New Mediumhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/sAMC2Tsd8fQ/new-medium.html
I've started moving my writing over to Medium, for many reasons. I've thought long and hard about it, and I'll expand upon all that later. But for now, head over to medium.com/@cityofsound. I've set up four main 'channels', or publications...I've started moving my writing over to Medium, for many reasons. I've thought long and hard about it, and I'll expand upon all that later. But for now, head over to medium.com/@cityofsound.

I've set up four main 'channels', or publications in Medium-speke, to organise the work.

This seemed like a good high-level organisation of the things I've frequently written about here over the last 15 years or so. Indeed, long-time readers will probably even recognise their frequently referenced titles. Not everything fits there neatly, but the descriptions below should give you a sense of how and why the writing has been categorised.

A chair in a room / Concerning the design of interactions, things and experiences. Title via Eliel Saarinen: ”Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room...”

But what was the question / Essays and journal entries concerning technology and the city. Title lifted from Cedric Price’s “Technology is the answer. But what was the question?”

I am a camera / Reflecting on places, often cities. The title is lifted from Christopher Isherwood: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

I'm not moving everything I've written here, by a long chalk. That would be as unnecessary as it would be tiresome. Rather, I'm selecting the pieces I think may be worth reproducing there. This site will still exist—I don't want broken links—but in moving the selected articles across, I've taken the liberty of fixing up a few things (links, references, reflections) and in particular, exploited Medium's ability to handle large images.

It'll take me a long time to tidy everything up here which, as usual, will be done in the wee small hours, so bear with me. But in the meantime, I hope you find the new place useful, enjoyable. If you do, please hit the 'recommend' button at the bottom of Medium articles, so that others may find them too. Cheers.

]]>This blogDan Hill2016-10-02T23:32:47+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2016/10/new-medium.htmlEssay: Shepherd, sheepdog; on people, robots and citieshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/U_st_e8BWIs/essay-shepherd-sheepdog-people-robots-cities.html
My latest column for Dezeen addresses robotics and cities. I'd started writing this months ago, and some of the examples betray that. Still, it took me that long—usually on planes, trains but not yet autonomous automobiles—to find the time to...My latest column for Dezeen addresses robotics and cities. I'd started writing this months ago, and some of the examples betray that. Still, it took me that long—usually on planes, trains but not yet autonomous automobiles—to find the time to edit it down. As usual, you can read the longer original cut below; the tighter Dezeen version is over here.

This one emerged from several conversations over the last year or two, so thanks to Matt Ward and his brilliant team and class at Goldsmiths College for helping me develop the 'shepherd, sheepdog' idea. Thanks to Noah Raford and Matt Cottam and his brilliant team at Tellart for making that manifest at Museum of the Future. Thanks also to conversations with Indy Johar, on and off-stage at MakeCity Berlin, for helping me realise the implicit slavery angle a little more directly. Thanks also to Chris Green for the conversations about drones, rooftops and more besides.

The shepherd and the sheepdog

The image of a standard-issue bus driving through a standard-issue Chinese city flitted across Twitter. Utterly unremarkable at first glance, a closer look revealed the driver was kicking back, arms outstretched above his head as the bus rolled forward by itself. The image was of a trial of self-driving buses developed by the Yutong corporation, due to be running in Chinese cities within the next few years. Perhaps the driver was day-dreaming about whether he’d have a job this time next year.

These are welcome moments amidst the ever-increasing noise around autonomous vehicles, shifting the narrative away from different forms of private car and towards the idea of on-demand, shared autonomous fleets as a form of public transport, something I’ve written about here before. (It’s also good to see some of the spotlight briefly wrestled away from California, onto a different set of cultural dynamics.)

Yutong’s grainy images also give us a clearer idea of what our brave new robot future will look like, its natural habitat being the humbly mundane, everyday urban infrastructure of buses and bins, fridges and façades, wetlands and window-cleaners. This is quite different to the previous popular imagination of robotic buses, which tended to feature placeholder characters like Johnny Taxi, the humanoid robot-driver in ‘Total Recall’ who had an unfortunate altercation with the future Governor of California.

In reality, Johnny Taxi was a ferrying red herring: the bus itself is the robot, not the surrogate ‘driver’. Robots are more like infrastructure than actors. Despite Arnie’s best efforts.

Sam Jacob’s brilliant recent article for Uncubed explores this idea of robot as infrastructure rather than character, suggesting that the logical, or illogical, conclusion of the smart city—of AI, of robotics and autonomous systems, of algorithmic governance—is that “the city itself is a distributed robot”, the implication being a subjugation to the corporate forms of governance culture that produce many of the visions around urban tech.

Jacob’s article is a necessary corrective to some of the unthinking hype around robotics, and a broadside against the lazier end of smart city theory and practice. It can be imbibed alongside a dose of the leaked video of the ‘self-parking’ Volvo that drove straight through its watching researchers, perhaps on its way to a parking space that the car briefly judged to be of greater import.

Usman Haque discussed this #epicfail at FutureEverything Singapore recently, noting that it’s shocking precisely because of this visceral depiction of trust; the people in the video simply don’t react as the car drives at pace towards them, so confident are they that the code is right.

Projects like Superflux’s Drone Aviary at the V&A also sketch out this unthinking sleepwalk into encoding urbanism into robotics, deploying autonomous drones, whose twitching physicality becomes a tangible expression of network culture.

These are all powerful critiques, to be absorbed, dwelled upon, and then … how about embodied in urban design practice? Could we explore the possibility that the ‘city as distributed robot’ has potential as well as pitfalls? Could it possibly elicit a set of heuristics, a way of foregrounding that potential, whilst actively avoiding the pitfalls in autonomous systems, using critique to more deliberately sculpt the ‘dark matter’ that directs them?

And can we use the notion of distributed robotics to elicit a design brief about cities today, as well as tomorrow?

Dirty, dull and dangerous

Much of the impact of autonomous systems may not be on trades like bus drivers at all. Both Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s primer ‘The Second Machine Age’ and Paul Mason’s polemic ‘PostCapitalism’ note that artificial intelligence, automation and robotics may impact just as heavily upon so-called ‘white collar work’. It could be that the higher-order neurological processes, like complex pattern-matching, are easier to mimic than those of our ‘lizard brain’ that runs things like our fine motor controls of dexterity, perception.

We’ve had code beating chess grandmasters for decades, after all. Chess, a classic symbol of intellect, is easy pickings, it turns out. Code may similarly replace much legal and medical diagnosis work, basic journalism and teaching. Yet getting a robot to clear tables in a busy restaurant is near impossible, apparently. A big dog can gracefully bound upstairs but Big Dog can’t.

We might see these systems as ‘freeing up’ humans, just as MOOCs ‘free up’ lecturers to focus on being teachers, and good diagnosis tools ‘free up’ lawyers and doctors to spend more time on empathy rather than file recovery. Of course ‘free up’ is all too often a euphemism for ‘fire’. But need it be?

John Maynard Keynes used to call this these kinds of shifts "temporary phases of maladjustment”, and in the past, broadly speaking, the jobs that have been closed off or radically diminished have tended to be replaced by new jobs elsewhere. Overall, we, humanity, has ended up in credit through these maladjustments. Much of the literature suggests that this time may be different, however. But then again, we’ve heard “this time it’s different” many before times too.

Yet those in and around robotics discourse still often talk about autonomous systems conducting work that is “dirty, dangerous and dull” for humans to do. That intrinsically associates the discourse with manual labour, with low-paid work.

Indeed, taking that “city as distributed robot” idea for a walk, one can imagine small, bespoke robots scurrying down storm drains, lizard-like forms designed for that one purpose. Or a window-cleaning octo-droid suction-padding its way around the facade of a Cairo skyscraper, polishing the photovoltaic cells at the 72nd floor in 40 degree heat. Or a vaguely intelligent linear substrate diligently melting the snow off apartment block rooftops in Helsinki, eight floors up at a finger-numbing -20, turning ice into greywater for the toilets below. These are jobs I would rather than humans weren’t doing, personally.

Yet this is work that people do, and have done for centuries. If “dirty, dangerous and dull” defines work suitable for robots, then we have always used humans as ‘robots’. There is apparently no limit to how little we can value human life when it comes to dirty, dangerous and dull work.

Indeed, every time discussion about this kind of robotics emerges, perhaps we should take a sobering look at the infamous Brookes slave ship diagram, by the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade from 1787.

It feels uncomfortable to make the comparison. But perhaps that discomfort should be felt when discussing robotics, and forms of labour. Indeed the recent slew of popular dramas about robots tend to dwell on the emotional or political relationship between humans and robotics. Films like ‘Her’, ‘Big Hero 6’, ‘Chappie’,’Ex Machina’, ‘Avengers Age of Ultron’ and the hit TV shows ‘Humans’, all released over the last two years, directly or indirectly explore what it means to be human, what it means to be robotic, and what we do with the Venn diagram of potential overlap that is emerging. This is partly about power. As pointed out at Racked, the key characters of the primary ‘synths’ in ‘Humans’ and ‘Ex Machina’ happen to be female, and often, Asian.

Elsewhere, researchers been conducting experiments on peoples’ empathy for robots. For instance, hitchBOT, a hitchhiking robot, was helped on its way across Canada, Netherlands and Germany “without incident” yet vandalised within two weeks of setting foot on American soil. Japanese kids apparently have a tendency to beat up lone robots in a mall; particularly if they are “human-like”. (One is reminded of the San Francisco craze for vandals flipping over Smart cars, and feels sorry in advance for the first waves of Google autonomous vehicles that are deployed to college campuses.) Conversely, Paro, the robot ‘baby seal’, is used to positively engage dementia patients.

Perhaps the emergence of robotics will force us to confront how we treat the people that currently make our cities tick, largely invisibly and without voice. Given we may have to decide who does what going forward, the current attention on robotics could be repurposed as an opportunity to craft the kind of heuristic I mentioned earlier, sketching out the potential for positive relationships between people, robotics and labour. What is good work for tech to do, and what is good work for humans to do?

We must not unthinkingly deploy robotics in place of human labour, just because we can; equally, we should not continue to use people as if they were robots. We need to start sketching out the potential for positive relationships between people and robotics, carefully assessing who does what.

Maintenance robots and Dubai

Over the last two years I’ve been part of an ad-hoc design team (with my teams at Fabrica and then Catapult), led by the endlessly inspirational Dr Noah Raford of the UAE Government, with the Dutch-US design firm Tellart as the creative and inventive ‘engine-room’, exploring various futures of healthcare, education, municipal services. The exhibits of our concepts ran alongside the Government Summit, but also served as the foundation stones of the permanent ‘Museum of the Future’ that the UAE Government is now building.

In last year’s exhibit we kept back a small section of a full-size streetscape that was otherwise given over to the job of conveying a data-drenched urban environment. Here, Noah’s team located a couple of trump cards to depict a kind of ‘augmented municipal worker-maintenance droids’ team. A Japanese engineer wearing his giant exoskeleton stole the show, a total selfie-honeypot. We’d asked him to mime moving fallen trees or lifting wrecked cars out of the way, but he seemed to spend most of his time doing Tekken moves. To some acclaim, it must be said.

At the exoskeleton’s splayed feet, we see a rather more humble robot, partnered by a guy in pretend-municipal maintenance overalls. Sized somewhere between a lawnmower and a decently-proportioned pig, the robot was a kind of over-sized urban Roomba, its gleaming white plastic shell possessing a beetle-like demeanour.

In fact, it was an Italian beach-cleaning robot, a real product, called a Dronyx Solarino, borrowed for the exhibit and dropped into a different context. (Incidentally, is this not the most Italian thing? A beach-cleaning robot? It speaks to the modern(ist) Italian desire to control, curtail and clip nature into shape, the approach to regimenting the beach experience via lettino and ombrellone, to sleek industrial form-making and so much more.)

Yet importantly, we decided that it should be accompanied by a human worker in pretend-municipal overalls, guiding the beetle about its work. The robot was doing something a person would not do, trundling about 24/7, save the odd recharge, as part of the city’s infrastructure, not trying to replace human labour, but augment it.

Drones and rooftops

Amazon recently posited their thoughts about a generic zoning of the airspace above cities, to safely enable drone-based logistics. Let’s just pause to consider Amazon’s business strategy here: cities like London are clogged with white vans delivering Amazon parcels, and now Amazon are proposing Amazon drones as a solution to that problem—the problem that they helped create. Masterful. This kind of move will probably be a module on some MBA somewhere soon.

Personally, I’d suggest that couriers-with-phones-on-cargo-bikes are a far more viable, desirable ‘decentralised, responsive, on-demand system’. Research in Berlin found that 85% of all car-based deliveries in the city could be done on cargo bike; basically anything smaller than a fridge-freezer.

Yet if you think through drones via design practice, you end up in interesting places. The architect Chris Green did a wonderful piece of work as designer-in-residence at London’s Design Museum recently, producing a series of exhibits exploring urban drones. One thing Chris and I discussed was how drones actually offer up a chance to rethink urban rooftops, the ‘forgotten fifth facade’. Such an approach to logistics might reframe rooftops as stabling yards for drones, rezoning currently unproductive junkspace into spaces of buzzing activity and potential, covered with recharging points, photovoltaic cells and storage batteries, maintenance depots and logistics centres. And perhaps the equivalent of a pigeon fancier’s hut, ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ on the radio and tea on the boil, counting the drones out and back in again, loading parcels into repurposed ‘dumb waiters’ in 1930s apartment blocks.

Projects like SYNTH(e) in Los Angeles have provided inspiring examples of how to reimagine the collective kilometres of urban rooftop, in this case in Los Angeles. These forgotten spaces are otherwise merely voids and absences in the collective imagination of cities, as well as being largely unproductive. Projects like Chris’s might get us to look at urban rooftops again, whether we deploy drones or not. Equally, we could see roof as robot, as with the snow-eater mentioned earlier.

Unpacking the questions that elicit the answer “robots” might be an interesting tactic. It’s not just rooftops. We might sketch a different kind of robot for Helsinki: perhaps a slim, agile, slithering snow-clearing device, a shovel’s blade on caterpillar tracks, as if a rough, tough version of the enchanted brooms that danced with Mickey Mouse in ‘Fantasia’, its form factor no longer dictated by the need to encompass a human driver, but instead designed to patrol the liminal zones between kerbs, walls and lampposts.

(Note that another bit of the streetscape is the manhole cover. Perhaps it no longer has to be a man-hole. What other not-manholes might we be surrounded by?)

But having come up with that notional answer of the slithering snow-clearer, maybe the unspoken question is whether we have inadvertently designed Helsinki’s streets for today’s street-cleaner vehicles, relatively bulky machines that take most of the footpath, and have to awkwardly bumble and slide around from road to pavement, missing pedestrians and cars by mere centimetres.

Is this the reason that there are few trees planted on Helsinki’s plenty-wide enough downtown streets? While this new, imaginary slithery robot could be designed to wriggle and shovel its way around those streets more effectively, perhaps its additional benefit would be in enabling street trees where there are none.

Shepherd, sheepdog

I ran a brief for a class concerning urban tech at Goldsmiths College this year, under the tutelage of the inspirational Matt Ward. Some of the students developed this idea of the relationship between people and municipal robotics, with one group imagining that urban robots might have the character of near-feral animals in the city. They’d dug up a lovely old picture of cows grazing in a London park during World War 2. These are species we can’t communicate with directly, though occasionally we can read their signals, like the cows huddling under a tree indicating imminent rainfall. Yet we share the city’s spaces with animals (not often cows in the UK anymore, admittedly.) We are part of a symbiotic relationship.

I began to think of urban robots in the same way I think of urban foxes. I remember opening the front door of my childhood home in Sheffield one evening many years ago to see a fox in the front garden a few yards away, staring up at me, the look on its face as if to say “What are you doing here?” Presumably I looked at the fox with the same expression. We shared this glance for a few seconds, before the fox trotted off, with that delightfully light-footed foxy gait, going about its business next door. We both inhabit the city, we both move through the city with our own motives, our own habits, the fox was reading the same city in largely different ways. We construct pathways that are sometimes unique to our species—for me, roads, pavements, the interior of buildings I inhabit; for the fox, presumably seeing a street of back gardens as one connected, contiguous obstacle course. We have a different sense of space, of edges, boundaries, landmarks, but often inhabiting the same space. They eat our leftovers, as if we are flatmates sharing a city-scale fridge, perhaps. We are in fact co-habiting, occasionally encountering, yet not directly engaging.

Perhaps urban robots will similarly trundle and creep around the same space, with their own motives—which are hopefully slightly more legible, but that’s something we have to talk about—and their own way of seeing the world. We can already see videos of how a self-driving car sees the world; the exact same world as ours, just constructed and read entirely differently. A few years ago, Timo Arnall put together a beguiling collection of machine-vision videos which help us understand, a little, of this ‘other’ perception, and thus this other way of being.

Further in discussion with the Goldsmiths’ students, pursuing this animalistic line of thought, which was also underlying the scene we cooked up with Noah Raford and Tellart for the UAE show, we speculated that the human worker could be a ‘shepherd’ to the robot’s ‘sheepdog’. This relationship, of working together to perform tasks, with some form of mutual understanding—a highly limited one, but understanding nonetheless—and with the human shepherd guiding and tending, may give us a positive metaphor for urban robotics.

This allusion to fauna may not be appropriate, but it’s not intended to simply imply a simplistic master-servant relationship. Animals are rarely willing to just be servants: witness any hapless dog-owner in a park, screaming with impotent panic as their dogs run wild. So shepherd-sheepdog might be a usefully complicated relationship, but it’s a relationship with clear motive nonetheless.

Clearly, this quickly proffers the question, which one is the shepherd and which one is the sheepdog in the end? Or indeed, what is the sheep? But these are all usefully generative questions to hold.

Such a symbiotic relationship is not simply about romantically, or ethically, trying to find a role for people—it could be a key strategy. The best chess ‘players’ are now humans and code working in combination, as partners, each playing to their own strengths. The best engineers use code to optimise structures, yet retain decision-making as to which outcome is preferable, a judgement involving a more complex set of criteria than simply ‘optimised’. The power of Spotify’s Discover Weekly feature is the balance of code’s raw power and human-curated playlists offering surprise

These are all in shepherd, sheepdog territory.

That philosophy—of using tech to do only what tech can do well, whilst letting humans revel in what humans can do well—could provide us with a way forward for thinking about all kinds of urban technology. It’s a principle of not trying to do too much. This is often counter the impulse of technologists, where the innate drive can be to push the boundaries of what technology can do. This would be a rather humbler, quieter mode than tech is usually in. I’ve been working across several projects recently that explore this idea of ‘humble tech’.

If robots are the answer …

If we see the possibility in the ‘shepherd and sheepdog’ model, then perhaps we might see potential, rather than pitfalls, in the ‘city as distributed robot’.

There are many big “ifs” here, and we don’t have the best track record in deploying tech in this way. Yet this is all the more reason to engage with these dynamics, and bend them to our will as best we can. We can use the possibility latent within each technical advance to find new ways of thinking about cities; or indeed uncover old ways of thinking about cities.

We shouldn’t need the advent of autonomous vehicles to find ways of making streets safe enough for kids to play in, or removing the excesses of 1960s traffic engineering, or radically diminishing the number of vehicles in favour of walking and cycling, and favouring vehicles that are safe, quiet and run on renewables. We can do all of that without autonomous vehicles. But if the hype around new vehicles helps to foreground these qualities, then wonderful. Let’s deploy that new focus to ask the question of what we want our streets to be like, and then figure out how to get there, hi-tech or low-tech, just as the idea of maintenance robots might behoove us to reflect on how we treat low-paid dirty, dangerous and dull work today.

As I wrote in a previous article on self-driving cars, Cedric Price’s dictum “If technology is the answer, what is the question?” springs to mind, but this time as a positive heuristic, a way of channelling the motive force behind tech’s hype into interesting directions. How can we use the apparent answers, dropped in front of us daily, to reframe the way we think about today’s cities, as well as those tomorrow?

Recalling Cedric, the answer ‘delivery drones’ leads me to the question of ‘what to do with our urban rooftops?’ The answer ‘autonomous vehicles’ suggests the question of ‘what do we want our streets to be like?’ The answer ‘self-driving bus’ makes me wonder about ‘what public transport could be?’ And the answer ‘municipal robotics’ could instead offer up a set of broader, deeper questions of inequality, craft, labour, immigration … and what we want, as humans, to do and to be.

]]>Cities & PlacesEssaysInteraction DesignUrban informaticsDan Hill2015-12-11T00:00:19+00:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/12/essay-shepherd-sheepdog-people-robots-cities.htmlEssay: 'The commodification of everything', for 'SQM', by Space Caviar (Lars Muller)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/3eyjxqNb-pI/essay-the-commodification-of-everything-for-sqm-by-space-caviar-lars-muller.html
This follows the earlier post on this set of essays, which also features 'A sketchbook for the city to come: the popup as R&D', for AD, and 'Urban Parasites, Data-Driven Urbanism, and the Case for Architecture' for A+U. This one...

"The way we live is rapidly changing under pressure from multiple forces—financial, environmental, technological, geopolitical. What we used to call home may not even exist anymore, having transmuted into a financial commodity measured in square meters, or sqm. Yet, domesticity ceased long ago to be central in the architectural agenda; this project aims to launch a new discussion on the present and the future of the home. 'SQM: The Quantified Home', produced for the 2014 Biennale Interieur, charts the scale of this change using data, fiction, and a critical selection of homes and their interiors—from Osama bin Laden’s compound to apartment living in the age of Airbnb."

My working title for this was ‘Fractal domestic’—you'll see why if you read on—but when published it became ‘The commodification of everything’, which is also about right, exploring the different understanding of domestic environment that Airbnb prompts. As usual, there are positive implications of this to flush out, as well as negative ones.

Read on.

—

The commodification of everything

Kalle Freese knew how to make a cup of coffee. Indeed, he was the Finnish barista champion. But he still needed somewhere to learn how to sell a cup of coffee, to craft an environment he wanted to sell coffee within, to try running a service business in a particular space.

However, like many in Helsinki working at the more innovative margins of food culture, Freese faced a mountain of regulations almost implicitly designed to keep him out. These were a manifestation of Helsinki’s apparently exemplary bureaucracy, not least their particularly stringent food hygiene regulations, but also one of the most highly-regarded urban planning outfits in the world, which exerts a tight grip on the designated use of urban space.

Many younger, mobile Helsinki residents, like Freese, were aware that cities elsewhere were benefiting from a more diverse, innovative food culture, from the small coffee shops Freese want- ed to start up, to the street food scene, to organic and locavore food cultures, to people hosting dinners which hovered between private and public events, in spaces that were also indeterminately domestic and commercial. Yet the tight grip of regulations on both spaces for food and on spaces for innovation prevented much in the way of real change in Helsinki.

In response to this, Ravintolapäivä, or Pop-up Restaurant Day, emerged as a grassroots citizen-led movement, hovering in the indeterminate space between legal and illegal, domestic and commercial. Initially it was little more than an agreement among participants to make and serve street food, or small café food, on a particular day, working from domestic spaces such as first or second floor apartments (with food lowered to the street via baskets in the case of the latter), or vacant commercial spaces, or street-side, or in parks; wherever, in fact, people felt was a good, convivial place to make and serve food, rather than the spaces that authorities had designated as appropriate. This ended up being a ground-floor apartment with a handy window to serve from, as much as anything else.

Ravintolapäivä turned out to be a huge success. Helsinki’s streets on Ravintolapäivä days are full of a rich diversity of food experiences, created and served by the city’s increasingly diverse population, from a diverse set of hastily repurposed spaces. None of the spaces are formally cafés or restaurants. None have licenses for preparing and selling food. Most have leasing arrangements described in years rather than hours. Most are zoned as residential rather than commercial. Most of them are, in fact, apartments. Ravintolapäivä found a way of temporarily re-zoning these spaces on-the-fly, at the whims of its residents. The tools by which Ravintolapäivä happens are—it almost goes without saying—social media-based web services, accessed primarily on location-aware smartphones.

Freese himself opened up a trial coffeeshop on Ravintolapäivä, in a humble vacant ground- floor space in downtown Helsinki, and to huge acclaim. He now has his own gourmet coffeeshop business on the aptly-named Freesenkatu elsewhere in the city, yet Ravintolapäivä offered a space for experimentation, almost a form of training wheels. The space he set-up in was an at- tractive part of town; yet market dynamics meant it was temporarily vacant—like most Western cities, the inefficiency of market-led dynamics mean huge chunks of the city’s commercial spaces are frequently temporarily vacant. Ravintolapäivä provided an opportunity for the owner of the space to open it up to Freese gratis, for a day at least.

The formal processes of zoning and planning, and other legislation regarding access and use of space, work at a very high level, focusing on major strategic planning initiatives to engineer change while blanketing all other activity in a prescriptive ‘dark matter’ of legislation. Ravintolapäivä works because it ‘flies under the radar’ of such bureaucratic cultures. It remains semi-legal—at best—for similar reasons. Yet such activities work perfectly at the scale of streets and neighbourhoods, which is the scale that people primarily live, work and play, of course. The tools citizens use to make decisions are advanced and sophisticated but off-the-shelf, accessible and often well-designed to be highly accessible and usable. They may only enable a highly localised form of decision-making— decisions at an urban scale may prove problematic— but existing legislation can rarely scale down to this level effectively.

There is now a radical disjunction between the formal decision-making processes of the city council and the informal decision-making processes of the city itself. While it remains to be seen whether the latter can deliver the slow-release permanence of formal urban planning, they are at least able to move fluidly into urban spaces below the radar of the former, accessing and re-configuring the fine-grain of the city in a way that urban planning never could.

In a similar way, contemporary services like Airbnb wheedle a form of hotel accommodation out of existing urban fabric. Commercial zoning at the district level, or designation of space for commercial activity at the building level—in this case whether a room can be a hotel room or not— does not appear to match the fine-grained and fluid way that some people perceive what space can be.

Airbnb, over a few years, has unlocked hundreds of thousands of pseudo-hotel rooms from existing urban fabric, in the form of spare rooms and vacant apartments. They now offer the equivalent amount of accommodation as the entire Hilton hotel chain. It took Hilton a century to construct all their hotels, brick-by-brick, and Airbnb have come along, armed only with software, and created more, in six years, without laying a brick.

Software has enabled an entirely different approach to managing space, providing an agile, highly transient and flexible conception of urban fabric. Why shouldn’t a spare room be made available for hire? A few clicks make it happen. In comparison, the processes of bureaucratic approval seem lumbering, intractable and monolithic, and are apparently largely unable to prevent it happening anyway. It is another example of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s choice phrase, “software is eating the world.”

As an example of the so-called sharing economy, Airbnb possesses similar dynamics to urban mobility services like Uber and Lyft, which exploit a redundancy or inefficiency of space or resource use, supposedly a product of a twentieth-century approach to managing such things: through designation, planning, licensing. Just as Ravintolapäivä found ways of using urban space in the grey areas left over by high-level approvals, services like Uber and Airbnb offer entirely new urban services by thriving in similar gaps. Is this apartment a hotel? Is this private car a taxi? The software supporting all these activities trans- forms inefficiencies—the ‘redundancy’ of unused parked cars or unoccupied rooms—into the raw material for new services. In doing so, it changes our perception of the city’s fabric. This is as big a challenge for the business of urban planning as it is for the Hiltons’ business.

However, underpinning such approaches, at least in commercial services like Airbnb, is a clear ideology. This could be described as the capitalistic ideal of maximising resource utilisation, a ‘commodification of everything’ applied to domestic space. It can manifest itself in the skirting of as much local regulation and taxation as possible, for the sake of better user interfaces for urban space. ‘Sharing economy,’ then, is a complete misnomer.

Almost twenty years ago, these dynamics were foreseen and described by Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook as the “Californian Ideology.” They arguably represent a form of civic failure rather than market failure. In circumventing taxation and regulation, and operating in the high-value pockets of town where the pickings are easy, Airbnb or Uber give little sense that they might enable more equitable services, or that they see the city as a public good. (Uber is perhaps easier to criticise on this basis, yet Airbnb could be creating upwards pressure on rents, which is not exactly helpful.)

While strategic urban planning may seem untenably slow and opaque in comparison, there is at least a chance it has public interest at its core. Several strong critiques of the idea of sharing economy are now emerging, suggesting significant issues with stretching such dynamics over the city, particularly over domestic space.

At first glance, it’s odd to see manifestations of this culture, such as disruptive pop-ups, emerging in Helsinki in particular, which is as far away from California as one could get—in its solid social democratic backdrop as much as its climate. However, in recent years Helsinki has positioned itself as a centre for start-ups in Europe, trying on an entrepreneurial culture in much the same way Finns holidaying in Spain try on espadrilles; at first awkwardly, and then with gusto. The same kind of people that create the Ravintolapäiväs of this world also inhabit Aaltoes, the local start-up support network and first European partner of Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. Much of this is positive, if it could be reframed through a Nordic lens. Yet that is a big 'if'. We might wonder how far Californian businesses like Airbnb can travel outside of California; yet the ideology of the same name may have been preparing the ground more widely than we think. While Helsinki can consider itself to be a very well-run city by almost any twentieth-century measure, it is not immune to the ‘radical disruption’ of Ravintolapäivä/Airbnb twenty-first-century dynamics, to the extent that people now expect systems to simply behave in a certain way.

However, there is something intriguing in that malleability and fluidity of domestic urban space that Ravintolapäivä and Airbnb enable, whether in Helsinki or San Jose. Could it suggest a more fractal organisation of space within the city, perhaps more in tune with many twenty-first-century conditions, in which an apartment can shift mode from residential to commercial to industrial over the course of an afternoon, at the behest of network logics?

In fractal planning, zoning is something that occurs at the level of the room, within the home, rather than at the neighbourhood level. Where zoning previously applied to broad sweeps of urban fabric, we now apparently have the tools to rezone a bedroom or living room as commercial property within a residential container, at least for a period of time. Again, the tools enable an apparent fluidity of space, at least in terms of fractal subdivisions of domestic fabric, rather than larger, more permanent schemes. Ravintolapaiva and Airbnb magic up restaurants and hotels out of our interiors. Will we begin to actively design residential space within this in mind? Might we see Airbnb-ready apartments emerging from architects’ drawing boards soon? How will this shift our notion of the home, as a retreat from the public? The inside from the outside?

Or, as municipalities now struggle with the over-supply of retail space in cities— given the preponderance of internet-based retail—could such fractal approaches open up such spaces to much-needed new housing, or spaces for the new light industry of fabrication? The formerly commercial would now host the residential, or the industrial? Or both? Could fractal approaches planning enable a more human-centred, localised designation of space, determined by communities themselves?

While services like Airbnb have been characterised as ‘disruptive in a bad way’, skirting regulation and taxation, there is no reason why they should. If municipalities decide to apply such rules, they can—just as many are now trying to regulate, reject or replace Uber. Given the the traces left by digital transactions, such services are arguably easier to identify and manage than previous processes (as long as municipalities are literate in such ‘big data’ approaches.) Authorities could easily ensure that taxes are paid, and that activities are safe; yet this requires a shift in stance, from inhibiting activity via the hefty blocking moves of regulation, to instead observing point-clouds of transactions and managing accordingly, knowing when to innovate through regulation, and knowing when to innovate through creating better public services themselves, taking advantage of many of the same dynamics.

For municipal governance, and for those that attempt to manage urban spaces, attempt- ing to wrangle these radically disruptive dynamics could be playing with fire. It simply may not be possible to disengage the services from the ideologies that underpin them. Yet what are the alternatives? This is why the fact that ‘software is eating the world’ presents such challenges; it is eating the world, and it is only just booting up. Our response to that, as citizens and cities, will determine whether it does so for public good or for private gain, whether our ability to shape and use our domestic spaces is enhanced or inhibited.

In deep winter, the sea around Helsinki freezes over, effectively doubling the size of the city. For as long as people can remember, this temporary extension of the city has been used for public fairs and feasts. In much the same way, Ravintolapäivä has found new places for food experiences within the existing fabric of the city, un-zoning, unlocking and extending the city’s potential via domestic space. Equally, Airbnb has illustrated that peoples’ perception of what residential space can be is far more fine-grained—more fractal—than the city’s approach to regulation can possibly handle.

While it is easy for some of us to characterise Ravintolapäivä as intrinsically ‘good,’ and Airbnb as a more equivocal entrant, in reality both present disruption to local governments. Both entail a radical re-drawing of domestic spaces in the context of the city. The question is whether the city can absorb the force of the disruption and redirect it, enabling a different conception of space while retaining civic and public value.

Here is a possibility to dissolve previously calcified boundaries between residential, commercial and industrial, between individual and collective space in the city, between bottom-up and top-down. Whether it does so beneficially will depend on how much we care about the idea of the city as a public good, and how adept we are at absorbing and redirecting disruptive forces for civic returns.

]]>Dan Hill2015-10-02T17:30:07+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/10/essay-the-commodification-of-everything-for-sqm-by-space-caviar-lars-muller.htmlEssay: 'Urban parasites, data-driven urbanism and the case for architecture', from Architecture + Urbanism, 2014:11http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/KFyiWztIbZc/urban-parasites-data-driven-urbanism-and-the-case-for-architecture.html
This follows the earlier post on this set of essays, which also features 'The Commodification of Everything' for 'SQM' and 'A sketchbook for the city to come: the popup as R&D', for AD. This one first published as: Essay: Urban...

This piece expands upon a pithier version of that earlier thought—we've built a lot of our cities, and value has increasingly shifted from traditional assets to services and experiences, so where is architecture? But it goes on to outline the case that we desperately need architecture (or some future iteration of it) due to the 'civic failure' implied by those shifts; that we need architecture, with its notions of being responsible for for the city (rightly or wrongly, in practice), to step up and engage with how are cities are now being transformed.

The tools, as well as a huge chunk of the value, may be shifting from buildings and hard infrastructure to services and experiences—like Uber, Lyft, Bridj noted here, and this essay focuses more on transport, compared to SQM's focus on Airbnb—hence at least some part of architectural practice needs to move on from having buildings as the only output. The answer to every urban question cannot always be a building, clearly. Whilst buildings may be part of some solutions, there are broader, deeper questions in play—good architects see this, but the practice (from education up) is still not exploring this implied question broadly enough. That's what this piece is probing away at, using technology as one way of opening that up.

I should also point out this is a cracking issue of A+U on 'Data Driven Cities'. A+U is one of the best journals out there; this edition no exception. It contains pieces by Eric Rodenbeck, Léan Doody, John Frazer, Timo Arnall/Jørn Knutsen/Einar Sneve, Usman Haque, Alistair Parvin, Geeta Mehta and several others.

OK, read on for the essay.

—

Urban parasites, data-driven urbanism and the case for architecture

Much traditional architecture is no longer necessary. The city is built. The western city, at least. For a country like the UK, arguably 80% of 2050’s built fabric already exists (according to the head of sustainability at InnovateUK). Similar conditions exist in much of the so-called western world. (Consider then, in particular, the absurdity of a country like Italy, with much of its built fabric delivered centuries ago, and with relatively little architecturally-led new-build in comparison, yet which still over-produces architects to the extent that one third of all European architects are Italian; one-tenth of all architects world-wide are Italian.)

If architecture, in the minds of most, is defined by enabling such built fabric–and noting that, in fact, architects generally have had a limited hand in that–then whither architecture?

Moreover, the city actually continues to change, just without the attention of architecture. If one could transport a citizen from a 1980s London street and drop them into today’s equivalent, they’d see little material difference in the built fabric. The basic topography of the street remains largely familiar, its buildings essentially the same; the patterns and conditions of pavements, roads, vehicles and street furniture largely consistent.

Unable to see significant physical changes, our eagle-eyed time-travelling tourist would instead notice that 2014’s citizens are constantly focused on their hands, where they repeatedly peck and paw at small glowing panes of glass. These smartphones are essentially the only visible token of an increasingly pervasive network of connected people, buildings, objects and spaces, but this web of services, overlaid onto the city, is not just changing how people organise and communicate. It is transforming the city itself.

By altering the way the city performs, the way it is experienced, the way it is constructed and enacted, our sense of the city changes, without radically altering its physical built fabric. 20th century architecture was largely concerned with the latter, across numerous philosophical and practical movements. So what happens to architecture when meaningful changes to the city don’t rely on architecture’s traditional vehicle – the building?

The significant cultural cachet associated with that Roark-ian 20th century mode has long lost its lustre either way. The architect, limited by an inability to create and drive new business models or modus operandi beyond eliciting design fees for each building, has ended up in an abusive relationship with the construction industry. It’s a long way from being the master builder. Like some other mid-century modern design trades—such as furniture design, for instance—it is increasingly sidelined by the currently-rampant technology sector, whose propulsive drive is characterised by Marc Andreessen’s statement: “software is eating the world.” As Kazys Varnelis has said “technology is our modernity”; the substitution of trades associated with prior versions of modernity (e.g., architecture, furniture, interiors) with those of contemporary modernity (e.g. code) is nearing completion.

Instead, the city is altered through software. In particular, a kind of parasitical software is ‘retrofitted’–though there’s hardly anything retro about it–over the existing urban fabric. These urban ‘parasites’–often benevolent, though not always–include services like Uber, Lyft and Bridj, which use the dynamics of software and data to re-conceive urban mobility, here exploiting the massively inefficient model of private car ownership, levering new services out of the gaps in-between car use and public transit.

Google’s self-driving cars could further radically change the way we move around cities, without building a single road. Recent research by MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab under Carlo Ratti suggests that take-up of shared autonomous vehicle fleets—effectively, automated taxis on-demand—could reduce the number of private cars required for a city like Singapore by up to 80%. This would facilitate a radical rethinking of urban fabric, freeing up vast amounts of urban space currently given over to wasteful parking. Such parking space could instead be schools, parks, factories, housing etc. Such resource re-allocation is ultimately driven by software. Physical space is being directly affected by code. (An example probably closer to home, and nearer term: many cities are being slowly rewired by software-enabled bike-sharing schemes, which again, require minimal physical infrastructure and zero buildings.)

Advances in mobility may even change our perception of the city’s physical form. In Joan Busquets’ supreme book 'Barcelona: The Urban Evolution of a Compact City', there’s a diagram of three successive maps of Europe, in which real distances seem shorter thanks to the high-speed train. The likes of Uber and self-driving cars, and contemporary apps like Citymapper, may enable comparable perceptual transformations.

Services like AirBnB use software to enable an entirely new model for accommodating travelers. They now list more rooms than the Hilton hotel chain, all extracted from the existing urban fabric; hotel rooms we didn't know were hotel rooms, wheedled out of previously inert space. It took Hilton 110 years to build their empire, hotel by hotel, brick by brick; AirBnB have enabled more rooms in roughly six years, without building anything except code. (Imagine how annoying that is for the Hilton chain.)

Crowdfunding services like Kickstarter, In Our Backyard, Neighborland, Spacehive and others enable iterations and self-improvements for neighbourhoods, through a scalable and distributed funding model and collaborative citizen participation—at least for some citizens. Whilst they rarely consider the true complexities of decision-making about shared urban spaces and amenities, crowdfunding services are also changing how cities are produced.

All these ‘urban parasites’ revolve around a clear and often consistent set of ideas, centred on uncovering and exploiting resource inefficiency via data, allied to an individualistic ‘user pays’ funding principle, hyper-convenience and quality user experiences. Software turns urban inefficiencies (i.e., the ‘redundancy’ of unused parked cars, unoccupied rooms, waiting bus queues, etc) into the basis of new services–ones that change our perception of the city, its responsiveness and malleability.

While there are few distinctly urban philosophies at the heart of these services–they work in cities, because that’s where inefficiencies can be most profitably scaled–there are, nonetheless, distinct ideologies. They often exemplify what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called 'The Californian Ideology' (1995).

As such, there is rarely a wider civic responsibility at play in these services. The sense that the city is a public good is missing in action. Such services target a niche, and widen from there, through so-called ‘disruptive innovations’, but don’t possess the dynamics of a civic service predicated on a wider sense of inclusive public good. They scale as far as there are convenient customers or regulation on their terms.

This is not market failure, but civic failure.

Uber has encountered serious resistance in almost every city it has expanded to, owing to an apparent strategy of attempting to ignore as many local regulations as possible. Avoiding such regulation, and perhaps local taxation, as per Amazon et al, will also destabilise the funding base for public services. Yet Uber does not try to scale into a full public transport service, with all the ‘unpopular’ but nonetheless mandated routes that would entail. Uber appears to be concerned with, as George Packer memorably put it, “solving all the problems of being 20 years-old, with cash in hand”. Yet its success could end up destabilising public transport for everyone else. Such services are rarely designed to scale to serve citizens as well as customers; its targets are those with a credit card and a Twitter account.

Similarly, civic crowdfunding platforms might enable a shift from public funding coordinated by representative democracy to small pools of private funding, only delivering what market dynamics dictate popular; without careful design, crowdfunding could undercut local taxation.

Writers like Adam Greenfield have powerfully warned against these often veiled ideologies, as well as the political and ethical shortcomings underpinning the wide variety of services bundled under the ‘smart city’ banner. Alexandra Lange has written convincingly “against civic crowd funding”, noting that “making something big happen at an urban scale is more than a popularity contest.” Bryan Boyer notes that “the big innovations of Silicon Valley are not technical but social (and) as Uber and others who are developing social innovations wrapped in technology have discovered, the technical challenges of building an app are either matched or dwarfed by the social, political, and legal issues.”

And perhaps here is an opening for architects. Architects can possess a strategic form of design sensibility. They can be oriented towards systemic thinking as well as the details of execution, a relatively rich understanding of the idea of the city as public good, of the value of the civic, and of the social, political and legal frameworks that affect that. While many data-driven services are struggling with issues of privacy, identity and anonymity in the city, as well as the cultural specificity that causes problems for Uber, for example, the further it strays from the Valley, architecture has long articulated subtle shades of meaning through the interplay of culture and space.

Technically, legally and philosophically adept, architecture could usefully inform this play-off between ‘Californian Ideology vs civic space’, presenting a richer understanding of urban processes and politics, of making complex decisions with real trade-offs and long-term consequences, of baking the idea of ‘city as public good’ into the DNA of structures and platforms that affect the city.

Further, there is of course specific expertise in articulating the way that spatial dynamics and built fabric continue to affect urban conditions, despite software’s power. As Boyer says, 'matter matters' after all, and a great deal of the great promise of Internet of Things is in its very thingness. There, architecture has much to offer.

Not only would engaging with these issues be a way out of the the aforementioned abusive relationship with the construction industry, and the concomitant self-pitying navel-gazing, but it would position the architect at the heart of contemporary decision-making about the city once again, rather than being shunted to the margins of building.

Yet this involves repositioning architecture, locating a productive new voice within a data-driven urbanism, a useful and necessary counterpoint to the crystalline yet ephemeral architectures of software. Those software architectures, when applied to decisions about new urban services like Uber and AirBnB, or when enabling new platforms for decision-making such as crowdfunding services, could use the perspective of architecture and urbanism to prevent that ‘civic failure’.

But is architecture up to that repositioning? Le Corbusier once defined architecture as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.” If that is all architecture is now, it has little future in a world largely already built—and elsewhere built largely without architects. Bernard Rudofsky’s thesis “architecture without architects” concerned vernacular architecture; yet much of the contemporary city is being shaped without architects. So architecture has to fight for its right to remain at the table; it’s not clear yet, judging by both academia and practice, that this is understood.

]]>Cities & PlacesEssaysExperience DesignUrban informaticsDan Hill2015-10-02T17:28:01+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/10/urban-parasites-data-driven-urbanism-and-the-case-for-architecture.htmlEssay: 'A sketchbook for the city to come: the popup as R&D', for AD 'Popups and Parasols'http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/2iWgouB0lAA/sketchbook-for-the-city-to-come-ad-popups-parasols.html
This follows the earlier post on this set of essays, which also features 'The Commodification of Everything' for 'SQM' and 'Urban Parasites, Data-Driven Urbanism, and the Case for Architecture' for A+U. This one was first published as: 'A Sketchbook for...

It was an honour either way. But it was particularly an honour to be asked to contribute a piece to Architectural Design journal (known as ‘AD’ in the trade) as I was proposed by guest editor Leon Van Schaik. Leon is professor in architecture at RMIT University in Melbourne (where I’m an adjunct prof.) and a huge influence on architects and architecture in Australia, and well beyond. Leon has, for a couple of decades, shaped the evolution of the city of Melbourne itself, via his design, curation, and stewardship of the university’s buildings programme, which he's strategically used as a lever to also enable a generation of brilliant Melbourne architects to emerge, each given the chance to work on significant institutional buildings through that innovative procurement strategy (there are a couple of books about that.)

So although I was asked to write about ‘pop-ups’, which I was not particularly inclined to do, the fact I was asked by Leon meant I had to. I was no fan of ‘pop-ups’ per se—for similar reasons as others—yet I felt I could reinterpret the brief a bit. But it also meant I probably had to write about Ravintolapäivä again, which again, I wasn't particularly inclined to do, having written quite enough about that already (one, two, three.)

Writing the article did get me into interesting new territory though—the idea of ‘fast and slow urbanism’ (which I’d also developed for a talk at an event in Copenhagen about the future of Nordic urban planning.) I ended up writing about the value of buildings as ‘slow urbanism’, as the opposite of popups’ ‘fast urbanism’, with the value of the latter being a kind of sketchbook for the city, revealing latent desires. I saw the possibility of the strategic designer in drawing a link from one to the other. Unpacking this further, as I have done recently, it becomes a way of thinking about governance, and design and planning strategy, in the city, suggesting value in both fast and slow layers of change (fast being things like software and much tech, events, temporary structures and spaces and slow being things like buildings, hard infrastructure and some institutional layers.) Both have value; you just have to be aware of both, of how to handle both, and to know what mode you're in when doing so.

I used the work that Bryan Boyer and I led, with our colleagues in Helsinki—‘learning from Ravintolapaiva’, and then our Open Kitchen project—as a case study. Huge credit to my colleague Bryan there, and others at in the Strategic Design Unit at SITRA (Marco Steinberg, Justin Cook, Kalle Freese and Maija Oksanen), as well as our culinary collaborators Antto Melasniemi and Elina Forss, and our highly supportive partner at City of Helsinki, Ville Relander, who was their food culture project manager at the time. (And now doing other great things in Helsinki, as I discovered over breakfast at The Cock the other day.)

—A Sketchbook for the City to Come: The Pop-up as R&D

At first glance, architecture, continuing its slow descent from its 20th century heyday to today’s rather marginal pursuit, has rarely appeared so denuded and impotent as when engaged in pop-up architecture. For a trade once predicated on mighty civic investment, to see architecture scrabbling around with leftover materials in the leftover gaps between leftover buildings is a little disappointing. Many pop-ups resist the idea of architecture altogether, simply taking place in whatever spaces are available; those that engage in new building are generally small parasitical entities, clinging on to the hulk of the existing city, or left alone to grow in the cracks between buildings, like weeds.

Yet just as a weed can be thought of a perfectly reasonable plant caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps these interventions could be useful elsewhere, at another point, when reframed in an entirely different way? Judged as architecture, through the traditional lens architecture is judged by, there is no there, there. With a different conception of architecture in mind, though, as medium for the production of social effects, these pop-ups and pavilions could be a kind of sketchbook for the city, a form of R&D for civic space, and for architecture itself.

Pop-ups pop-down

At face value, pop-ups are not exactly a powerful agent for social or spatial change in the city. The reason pop-ups can pop up so easily is because they can also pop down so easily. In terms of architecture, they are the frictionless lines of least resistance—slipping in under the radar of regulation, they are easy come, easy go. They are, in a sense, too damn easy.

Pop-ups leave little trace on the city as they rarely attempt to achieve systemic change within local patterns of urbanism. To systematically change urban processes, cultures and activities, one must deal in the ‘dark matter’ of regulation and governance: of planning law, permits, licenses, decision-making processes—the very things that pop-ups intentionally avoid.

Still, this lack of potency is both its blessing and its curse. It enables a form of experimentation on existing urban fabric, generally in terms of activity, sometimes in formal terms too. However, it is also easily co-opted, and now something of a cliché. It has, for instance, become the most tangible symbol of urban regeneration in progress, often deployed as a pause on the journey from one use of space to another—increasingly known as ‘meanwhile use’.

In many Western cities, this process can often mean a clearing out of previous attempts at social progress through architecture—social housing projects or populous industrial facilities—in favour of privatised housing; pop-ups are used to mark the halfway point, after tenants, prior to sales. Hence Oliver Wainwright’s description of the pop-up arts activities in Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower (1963) in East London as “the usual medley of arts-led temporary use … a live gentrification jamboree”, complicit in a recasting of the tower as the “zombie corpse of the welfare state, (now) eviscerated of its original social purpose.

When pop-ups aren’t inhabiting existing buildings, they might emerge from structures that are barely buildings at all, such as the shipping container ‘cities’ of Brooklyn’s DeKalb Market or London’s Boxpark Shoreditch. These piled installations of containers speak volumes about volumes. They are dropped in, without context, and with a universal form shaped and weathered by globalised trade patterns, designed for the transient floating architecture of container ships, rather than a place. They are also easy come, easy go, generally without even the formal experimentation of Joost’s Greenhouse installations across Australia, or Freitag’s elegant container tower in Zürich.

There is some sense that this might be a form of progressive architectural activity, redolent of the late-1960s and early-1970s. Yet these clumps of oxidising iron have nothing of the bravado, chutzpah and pizazz of Archigram’s Plug-In City (1964) or Instant City (1969). Those sketches and models were vast pieces of infrastructure, social and material, crunching colourfully through a greyscale 1960s England that, as Ballard reminds us, looked almost like it had lost the Second World War after all. Ironically, those ideas also emanate, in some way, from the war-time innovation machine whose architecture was necessarily mobile, ad-hoc and lashed-together.

If Instant City was an outcome of the post-war period, these container cities, like the pop-ups inhabiting Belfron Tower and the like, are an outcome of a period in which public space is increasingly privatised, in which the idea of the city as a public good can apparently only exist in a form that can be easily towed away (and it is surely no accident that these pop-ups envelop largely retail-oriented programs. While public art is also a keystone, it is generally rendered physical clickbait by the service structures around it.)

Many pop-ups deny new thinking about architecture altogether. That is partly the point. If one needed to ‘do’ architecture for a pop-up, most wouldn’t happen. It is a parasitical form of organisation, best-suited to inhabiting existing structures rather than creating new ones. It moves quickly, where architecture is ponderous (recall Koolhaas’s lament of "inhabiting a painful profession … architecture is too slow".) Whilst a form of ‘spatial intelligence’ may be at play within those inhabitation strategies, there is very little building.

Apps like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Citymapper radically change the perception and performance of space, also without building a single edifice, infrastructural or otherwise. And that’s before augmented reality really takes root. The city is beginning to be changed by software far more radically than by building. Even public transport is shifting into pop-up mode, via startups like Bridj, which runs what Techcrunch described as “a series of pop-up minibus routes … determined based on customer demand, daily changes in traffic, and several other factors (such as social media activity).” Not even a bus-stop stops these days.

None of this is exactly news. After all, as Sam Jacob has pointed out, perhaps the most radical statement of those progenitors of pop-up Archigram was that we should “declare a moratorium on building”. Architectural discourse, whether in the Daily Mail or AD, still revolves around new building nonetheless. But what happens to architecture when we are largely left with pop-ups filling the cracks in-between existing buildings?

The promise of pop-ups and pavilions

Here, actually, lies some promise. Where previous generations of pop-ups and pavilions provided impetus for formal experimentation, bold spatial exploration and material innovation, perhaps the next generation of pop-ups and pavilions can explore social and cultural potential?

Perhaps the most celebrated pavilion in modern architecture, Mies van der Rohe’s ‘Barcelona pavilion’ (1929), has hardly been surpassed by subsequent variations on this theme, such as those of the Serpentine pavilion programme, procured from a different representative of architecture’s Champions League each year. For all their occasionally pleasing spatial experiences, few have moved on from Mies conceptually. An exception may have been Rem Koolhaas’s pavilion with Cecil Balmond/Arup (2006), through its focus on programming over building, on designing a space simply as a platform for a curated set of events, with the emphasis on the latter.

Yet even that saw Balmond/Arup engineer a series of dome-like canopies to host the activity. For an example of a pop-up centred on events and activity alone, the Ravintolapäivä ‘Pop-up Restaurant Day’ is now a well-documented festival of street food, running every quarter in numerous countries. It started in Helsinki in 2011 as a reaction to the city’s allegedly stentorian food hygienic and food business licensing regulations, with little more than an agreement amongst a bunch of motivated citizens to pick a day and simultaneously make and sell street food from the streets—from their apartment windows, lowered down with baskets on home-made winches, or in the parks or street corners.

It was a roaring success from day one. And yet it was also illegal, or semi-legal at best; none of the participants had a permit to make and sell food on their premises, in their homes, in the street. Yet the scale of the activity meant that the city government couldn’t touch it, for fear of a gigantic public relations disaster. People, generally, loved it, and it spread like a benevolent virus. The city’s streets come alive on Ravintolapäivä.Ravintolapäivä exists purely through a simple set of instructions—effectively an ‘un-building code’—overlaid onto the existing urban fabric. No-one needs to design and build a restaurant to have a pop-up restaurant on Restaurant Day; a ground-floor window onto the street will do, as will a table propped up in the park.

The tools with which Ravintolapäivä happens are—of course—social media-based web services, accessed primarily on location-aware smartphones. No architecture required. This, as I've argued before, is where the so-called smart city is already manifest. Less in the grandiloquent, inappropriate plans of ICT multinationals; more in the hands of punters.

So, no, no architecture required here. Except of course the existing streets of Helsinki, that is, which, replete with six-storey courtyard blocks from the first half of the 20th century, do lend themselves to forms of communal activity in public. What’s interesting about Ravintolapäivä, over and above the social media-led organisation, is that it essentially articulates and embodies an un-voiced argument about what a Helsinki street is for. About what the city could be. About what those courtyards, balconies and facades could be.

The city’s regulations appear to mitigate against diverse street food offerings (in terms of culinary offer or spatial variety); the increasingly diverse and well-travelled Helsinki population appears to think the streets could be doing a lot more than they are, not least when it comes to empanadas, falafels and crépes. Who decides?

Seeing Ravintolapäivä as a city-wide pop-up, or a loose open network of pop-ups in toto, could give us another way of framing the pop-up, over and above the lines of least resistance. Perhaps if we see pop-ups as providing a sketchbook of possible cities, we can begin to unlock their potential. The science writer Steven Johnson has described the idea of the ‘adjacent possible’, the various alternatives that exist at any one point in time. Pop-ups provide a means for physically prototyping that adjacent possible environment, what a space could handle, what a street could be.

It’s easy to deride a pop-up street food festival as the same kind of activity that Wainwright described at Goldfinger’s Belfron Tower—a kind of ‘bread and circuses’ distraction, with an emphasis on the bread. Enjoyed primarily by Helsinki’s bourgeoisie, it would do little to change the food offer right across the city, or shift the quality of free school dinners upwards, say. Yet the challenge that Ravintolapäivä posed for the City of Helsinki was not what to do about this awkwardly popular semi-legal activity, but how to learn from it, how to absorb its dynamics into the core business of the city, such that the city adapted over time, yet in equitable, accessible fashion.

Seen in this way—as a sketch of what a street could be used for—it might provide a form of training wheels for a city administration beginning to deal with a far more heterogenous version of Helsinki than it had previously. This, then, could be a genuinely innovative pop-up, with spatial implications—yet only if the city government was able to see it as an ‘R&D’ activity that might suggest a more systemic change.

To paraphrase Daniel Kahnemann, this would require a kind of ‘fast and slow governance’ at the city level, rethinking planning and architecture in the civic plane.

‘Slow’ has a value—as in ‘slow food’, for instance, describing an ability not to be swayed by the vagaries of trends but instead cultivate an awareness of craft accreting over time, of social forms embedded in making. Yet in an culture which is increasingly alloyed to rapid technological change, ‘fast’ is also an important gearing to possess.

This would cast an architecture that practiced building as concerned with the ‘slow release’ functions of the long-term, of baking a set of social values into physical matter, making a virtue of the deliberate pace that provoked Koolhaas’s moan. Whereas architecture as practiced programmatic articulations of space, on existing built fabric, is concerned primarily with the faster cycles of cultural change.

Fast and slow. For instance, having quickly assessed Ravintolapäivä as a case study, SITRA’s Strategic Design Unit created a ‘not-a-cooking school’ called Open Kitchen, in response, working with both the City of Helsinki and local chefs. At Open Kitchen, selected Ravintolapäivä participants learned how to run a restaurant, how to locate organic food sources, how to fill in the City’s forms, how to obtain funding, and so on. These activities would set up a slow-release over the city, filling in the cross-hatched social spaces sketched out by Ravintolapäivä.

We had originally been planning (via my colleagues Bryan Boyer and Justin Cook) to design and deploy a food cart in Helsinki, as the 'bow-wave' of a more diverse local food culture embodied in the Low2No development. The organic development of Ravintolapäivä—and the unconnected yet simultaneous Camionette crêpes truck, documented here—meant we no longer had to do that. The 'fast' mode was taking care of itself; our job was to institute a more deliberate response, something that could take root in the city's infrastructure, organisational and built.

In this way, SITRA built a form of cultural superstructure around Ravintolapäivä, attempting to absorb the conditions suggested by ‘Pop-up Restaurant Day’ into a set of more productive, systemic changes concerning food and the city, and indeed what the city’s streets could be used for. Open Kitchen was deliberately located in the city’s former abattoir, repurposed as a food culture hub, such that these fast social effects might also take hold in the slower format of a building, physically embodying these new cultures. Open Kitchen was an attempt to fold the value of fast one-offs into the slower habits of everyday city life.

As I wrote at the time:

"Low2No and Brickstarter are examples of how a strategic design approach might be useful in shaping governance cultures and behaviours, in creating newly productive interfaces between citizens and municipalities, in finding ways forward where there is no clear road map, no prior knowledge, too much analysis and not enough synthesis ... we're creating matter—in this case Open Kitchen—in order to flush out and shape dark matter. As I wrote in Dark Matter & Trojan Horses—where you can also perceive the seeds of Open Kitchen—this is about taking interventions, absorbing their strategic value, and making them deliver systemic change."

So, in observing the emerging fast layers in the city, like street food pop-ups or civic crowdfunding platforms—and one's eyes have to be open to even see them, importantly—the key question is how are particular and appropriate dynamics of those layers absorbed into slower layers of city administration or urban fabric, in order to create more effective, more equitable change within the city.

Could we reimagine the 'clock speed' of urban planning in this way, by actively interrogating when we are in slow mode or in fast mode? If our ongoing urban research indicates productive non-building-related change, this could be working on a fast layer; and the response could be to work in an equally fast mode—via service layers, events, media and social infrastructure—or in a slow mode, via building and hard infrastructure, or fundamental organisational change. Both are required responses; knowing which mode you're in might be key. So the implication is for a more multidisciplinary, holistic entity than the current divisions one sees in city government. (Duffy/Brand pace layers are useful here, as ever.)

Fast and slow social effects

Rory Hyde, in his essay in Esther Charlesworth’s book on humanitarian architecture, describes a higher-order function of architecture, well beyond the simple fact of building:

“What is architecture if not a medium for conveying social effects? Form and design are merely the means of embedding these social effects into the built environment, in order that they may continue to manifest over time. While mainstream architecture is distracted by its own images, humanitarian architecture offers an alternate example of an architecture that repositions form and design as secondary to the production of these social effects.”

If this is where architecture is, or perhaps should be, then can we see pop-ups and pavilions as providing a form of R&D for architecture itself, as well as for the city? To borrow from Hyde, what social effects are being produced during Ravintolapäivä, and how?

Assessing Ravintolapäivä through this lens, we see that there is much for architecture to do. There is a clear relationship between the street, between co-opted spaces, with temporary structures, with communication technologies, with transient formations of communities of interest and propinquity, and with a wide variety of cultural activity enabled by all of the above. In other words, with experimentation in social effects, in space, in place.

Here is a pop-up activity which offers a meaningful role for architecture—in learning from its dynamics and carefully folding them into the city’s ‘dark matter’ in order to enable a more equitable and powerful systemic change. Stewart Brand and others have noted the fast and slow layers within buildings, and architecture’s traditional role in orchestrating them, fundamentally important in previous decades. Here is a chance for architecture to discover a valuable role for orchestrating fast and slow layers of social effects in an age often beyond the simple fact of building.

Perhaps ‘slower buildings’ remain a platform for the slower layers of social production, and ‘faster buildings’ (pop-ups and pavilions) are a platform for exploring faster social effects? The challenge for architects is to move seamlessly from one to the other, from fast to slow.

With this richer recasting of architecture in mind, the pavilion and the pop-up may continue to provide the opportunity for R&D for the practice of architecture, as well as being an open sketchbook for the city itself.

]]>Cities & PlacesEssaysExperience DesignStrategic designUrban informaticsDan Hill2015-10-02T17:25:52+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/10/sketchbook-for-the-city-to-come-ad-popups-parasols.htmlJournal: Three essays from last summer; networked urbanismhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/ljEtfVF8Nls/hree-essays-on-a-new-urbanism.html
“The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much” —Frei Otto Around this time last year, at the family home in Brisbane, in the jetlagged early hours of what was ostensibly a holiday, I wrote a set...“The secret, I think, of the future is not doing too much”—Frei Otto

Around this time last year, at the family home in Brisbane, in the jetlagged early hours of what was ostensibly a holiday, I wrote a set of articles for three architecture-oriented publications—a magazine, a journal and a book—all concerning the dynamics of contemporary technologies and how they may affect architecture and urbanism, and more importantly, cities.

The book was 'SQM: The Quantified Home', Space Caviar (ed.), Lars Muller Publishers (2014) and it concerned some of our shifting understandings of domestic space, taking Airbnb as a pivot for that. The articles were for Architecture + Urbanism (aka A+U) magazine and Architectural Design (aka AD) journal, and they covered a broader urban perspective.

An off-cut of all that was the germ of a subsequent Dezeen column on transport startups, and the longer edit was eventually posted here: 'Clockwork City, Responsive City, Predictive City and Adjacent Incumbents'. That discussed the early impact of Uber in particular—though also the potential impact of autonomous vehicles and predictive analytics—and their disruptive rewiring of urban mobility without without owning any of the traditional asset classes in mobility (vehicles, roads etc.) It talked about the fact that Uber-like services could equally be set up by public transit agencies; about the perhaps more interesting Bridj, developing data-driven services in the gaps left by a hub-and-spoke transit model; and many other things including Ancient Egyptian Nileometers, Nairobi's Matutus, and California's so-called ideologies. It was also the backdrop for a few comments around 'peak car' that I made at the end of a later Guardian article around 'mobility as a service', a nice piece written by Stephen Moss.

You can find links to the essays below, but first a bit of post-hoc context.

Many of these new dynamics are easier to discern when you see them through the lens of transport—a taxi is fairly tangible, after all—hence the headline-grabbing skirmishes over Uber at al. Yet we could look at Airbnb in a similar way: a tech-led startup radically shifts the use of urban form, without any of the traditional tools such as buildings.

These are new applications running on the old hardware, in other words. These, for me, are true demonstrations of ‘Internet-of-Things’—Internet dynamics fused into physical things, creating new value, and sometimes new problems.

In the 20th century, the general approach to solving urban problems was through building: new homes, new roads, new transport, new energy, water and waste infrastructure. This approach met a demand, but often had real costs, in terms of energy, carbon, pollution, congestion, health, wellbeing, ecology, disenfranchisement, and ultimately finances.

Now cities in the (over)-developed world are full of layered histories of infrastructure, full of building. Yet the demands continue to grow, and shift. And we can’t afford to take that 20th century strategy into the 21st, for a number of reasons: principally carbon, but also many other contemporary concerns. As a result, we need new thinking about building, un-building and re-building: using our existing resources and fabric in new ways: avoiding building unless necessary; performing sharp adaptation and modding—and when we do have to build, understanding exactly what and how we have to build, with greater precision and sophistication, and including how that might be best used, owned and adapted—and then adapting over time accordingly.

Not to say that there will be no building, clearly; even in over-developed London, the skyline is pockmarked with cranes. It's just that the view of buildings outside your window in 2050 may still be relatively similar to the view now in terms of the built form—just as it is probably largely similar to the view in 1980. Unless your window looks onto Pudong, in which case ignore me. This is indeed partly from a ‘western’ cities perspective, yet cities elsewhere need not drive down the cul-de-sacs many western cities did. We have to rethink how and what we build everywhere, hardware or software, north or south.

The built additions may be largely insertions, acupunctures and parasitical interventions, punctuated by the odd clean-slate new-build, sure. But built fabric is no longer the primary urban change layer—over the last decades, that has occurred in the less visible (until now) structures of network cultures.

This is quite different to the 19th and 20th centuries, when our cities’ infrastructures were rapidly constructed brick-by-brick, pipe-by-pipe, road-by-road, and extended out into largely non-urban land. That built fabric was the layer of change. The structure and culture of our city governments still betray that old mission to build and sprawl, as do many of our professions. (And that word 'sprawl' could apply to London as much as anywhere else.)

This century will need to be different. There is potential in networked systems to act as a kind of connective tissue laced in-between existing infrastructures, yet the qualities of this tissue are a little unclear, and those that we can perceive are sometimes in tension. And there are many aspects of this that are uncomfortable, opaque, damaging in numerous ways, reinforcing broader cultural patterns of individuality, inequality and intolerance.

Yet we could also pick out some potentially positive patterns emerging nonetheless—a foregrounding of urban experience, of human-centred services, of distributed, cellular organisation and shared ownership of infrastructure, of closed-loop off-grid systems, optimising existing infrastructures, resources and fabric over building anew, But when we do build anew, this new urban infrastructure potentially enables lighter, cleaner, more agile, intensive, productive, adaptive, participative structures, systems and organisations, doing more with less, an urbanism based around the internet's principles of “small pieces, loosely joined”, yet filtered through an urbanist's understanding of what enables public good. Whether these dynamics are imbued with a civic sensibility, or highly individualised, will need careful attention (I know what I'd prefer; making it happen won't be easy.)

I now realise these essays helped me begin to formulate that idea, suggesting a challenge for architecture and design in finding a way to engage productively with these new urban dynamics. 21st century networked urbanism needs the spatial intelligence that architecture brings, as well as its higher order strategic design skills. But this will also necessitate architecture finally getting its head around contemporary technology, as a primary material. And in doing so realising that, generally speaking, it has a lot of catching up to do and it is now only one of several relevant skills (others being, for example, interaction design, service design, software engineering, data science, industrial design, urban sociology, behavioural economics, neuroscience and many more.) Each of these will have as much to contribute, if not more, to the way the city is shaped.

Yet there are indeed entirely new spatial implications of all of these things—how Airbnb could change apartment design; how Audi Unite could change plots; how 'mobility as a service' or autonomous vehicles could dissolve the artefacts of the age of traffic engineering; how contemporary retail models could reduce the space allocated for traffic rather than increase it; how battery storage and local energy generation might change district design, and so on. Each of those has social, cultural and political implications too, as the essays touch on.

It seems to me that the most interesting layer in cities at the moment is best thought of as the objects, spaces, services and movements at street level—scaling from a phone up to a building, and zooming back and forth from individual to urban. There are people here, structures, vehicles, spaces, surfaces, objects, infrastructure, flora, fauna. This is the layer where change tends to happen; it's where the city is played out. A new kind of urbanism could emerge from this synthesis of disciplines, contexts and experiences. More on this later.

I’ll post the original rough cuts of those pieces here, one by one. Perhaps understandably, given I wrote them at the same time about the same thing, there are some overlapping thoughts, so please forgive that.

]]>Adaptive DesignArchitectureCities & PlacesEssaysJournalStrategic designUrban informaticsDan Hill2015-10-02T17:22:19+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/10/hree-essays-on-a-new-urbanism.htmlSketchbook: London Squared map, with After the Floodhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/gWlHMt_c3uM/sketchbook-london-squared-with-after-the-flood.html
One of the early collaborative projects at Future Cities Catapult—actually roughly the same time as Pixel Track with BERG—was a very small, very quick, but very useful, insightful and powerful bit of information design with After the Flood. I asked...One of the early collaborative projects at Future Cities Catapult—actually roughly the same time as Pixel Track with BERG—was a very small, very quick, but very useful, insightful and powerful bit of information design with After the Flood.

I asked them to work with us on a visualisation 'device' for data about London, principally the real-time air quality data that we're getting from our Sensing Cities project, which is a collaboration focused on low-cost sensors with Intel ICRI, Royal Parks, Enfield London Borough Council, Lend Lease and Southwark Council, amongst others.

Understanding that approach implicitly, After the Flood rapidly developed a productive way forward, similarly based on an exploration of how to bend geography yet with the focus on revealing various packets of data at borough-level, without losing the sense of that borough's place within the city.

Working through their design process, they say:

"Maps are excellent for navigating space, showing boundaries, landmarks, and location but lousy at imparting data ... (They create) an uneven ground on which to place figures – with important data finding no place to live. During the product development work with Future Cities Catapult, it became clear that there was a need for a way to visual data across all boroughs that did not create a visual bias due to the relative size of individual boroughs. We needed a new, non-geographic system to plot data." [After the Flood]

We had a few chats with me about it, back and forth during development, but most of this is their insightful work, running with the idea and producing a really useful, malleable chunk of design.

I love that the kink of the Thames is more or less all that's required to 'place' the city (although those of us who were lucky enough not to grow up with the Eastenders title sequence burned into your retina may struggle a little more.)

They did a shuffling of the boroughs' positions—each indicated by three-letter abbreviation—to enable a contiguous form, but very little indeed. Each of the resulting squares can be packed with data of various forms; potentially from sparklines to bars to concentric circles to alphanumeric to images:

Each square also offers a 'cell' shading possibility to convey at-a-glance reading of the entire city. So a single image offers both an overview of the city, as well as multiple borough-level datapoints. We intend to use this with real-time data, as such a map could convey the pulsing variability of urban flows extremely well, whilst an interactive version would enable a click-to-zoom into a particular borough, and then out again to city-scale, perhaps via an intermediate stage of related boroughs (it offers an alternative view of London to that developed by our Whereabouts project.)

We've used it a bit internally, but After the Flood have gone on to produce a map editor for you to use (get in touch with them to find out how), as well as an 'Instagram edition' which effortlessly makes clear the versatility of the design.

After the Flood have a great write-up of their design process, which is well worth a read. It's a bit of design work where the outcome seems so simple, obvious and 'right' that one wonders why it wasn't done before. The clever bending of London's geography to the task at hand—yet retaining the city's overall imageability—clearly has echoes of Beck's map, which is praise indeed.

]]>Cities & PlacesInformation DesignDan Hill2015-09-08T11:20:46+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/09/sketchbook-london-squared-with-after-the-flood.htmlSketchbook: User experiences for bikeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/H-ybvBUUIuM/sketchbook-new-user-experiences-for-cycling.html
Back in May 2015, the Urban Futures team completed a design research project around cycling. The team was Claire Mookerjee (Project Lead, Urbanism) with design by Anastasia Vikhornova and film by Christian Schmeer, joined by Rebecca Jones (Technologist) from the...

This short project uses film to sketch out some possibilities of contemporary technologies such as wearables and Internet-of-Things, in order to imagine new user experiences for cyclists. It’s covered in depth at Dezeen and elsewhere, so feel free to read about it over there. Below, a few background notes from me, unpicking some of the thinking (though we also do that on our research blog.)

While some of our projects involve more directed development of technologies in place—e.g. last year's Cities Unlocked, which was an end-to-end demonstration of a working system for wearable wayfinding—in this mode we're sketching. We were driven by the particular challenge of wayfinding for cyclists, given that our streets have been designed with cars and other motor vehicles in mind for the last half-century or so, and the signage with it (as good as Kinneir & Calvert’s work is, of course, stand in the street and look at what’s provided for car drivers versus pedestrians and cyclists.) Meanwhile, many pedestrians are looking down at their hands, staring a little blue dots on a map. But what might cyclists need? And what could we do once the street itself start ‘talking’ to people, to services? (In that sense, this project also picks up the threads from on our earlier collaboration with BERG, and their Pixel Track physical prototype for connected displays.)

In both of these kinds of projects—demonstrators and sketches—we're trying to make tangible the promise of otherwise abstract ideas like 'Internet of Things' (IoT) or 'smart cities'. To some extent it's an exercise in envisioning a possible future; albeit the future just around the corner. But the film attempts to locate that future in the everyday, to enable folks like transport infrastructure providers or technology companies to understand how they could work together to improve the 'user experience' of cycling. While suitably open, and non-prescriptive, it gives us a token to have those conversations with.

We're often in dialogue with major transport providers—Transport for London, Transport for Greater Manchester, Network Rail, the RTA in Dubai, the MTA in New York—to better understand their challenges, and we know that cycling has so many circular benefits for cities and citizens. And indeed many cities are spending serious money, time and attention on improving the 'hard infrastructure' of cities to make cycling safer, more convenient, more attractive. (Transport for London are due to spend £800m+ on cycling infrastructure over the next decade.)

Yet as well as this investment—and clearly significant attention to such hard infrastructure is key, preceding any conversation elicited by this film— there is still the potential of a soft infrastructure which can be overlaid on existing urban fabric to further support cycling, which could take advantage of contemporary technologies such as wearables, IoT, real time sensor data, and so on. Part of our job is making it easier to grasp that potential, partly in order to pull more focus onto the importance of improving the experience of cycling generally (using this as bait, in that sense) as well as exploring how entirely new experiences might manifest themselves. As well as transport providers we also talk to tech companies, from startups to multinationals, to understand what's viable here, and what their interests are too. Films like this can help suture these various perspectives together into a coherent set of possibilities.

The team framed all this in a broader urban perspective—exploring how cyclists navigate and move in the city, which is quite different to how drivers or pedestrians do so—and so we ended up developing this idea of sketching out possible solutions that use the city itself for navigation. We'd like to think that the technology could help people 'read the city' better, and at some point effectively disappear (not least as we wanted to explore a 'heads-up' stance, as you don't want to be pulling out your phone to navigate whilst cycling alongside a bus.)

Although there are several navigation devices proposed for bikes emerging—at the time, Tom Armitage’s great Columba and Hammerhead’s haptic feedback, for example, and several that have emerged since we published the film, such as SmartHalo—we wanted to explore a range of possibilities, hence developing five possible interfaces, from bike to body to bus, all of which were based on some fairly rapid user research from the team.

It's a small, quick project in a way—a few weeks—as we were also interested in how we can use design and film in this way, as a sketching method. Not simply filming to document, but as part of the design process. They’ve not benefited from in-depth ethnographic research; they don’t look at lead users, or refuseniks, or the broader accessibility issues, or terrain/climate issues, or more contingent views on how brittle such Internet-of-Things infrastructure could be, nor do they do all the other things one would do if doing product development for real. And clearly, it’s only when making something for real that these very meaningful issues are genuinely addressed, sometimes resolved. Yet we feel this still has value as design research, for all that.

With London’s awful recent record in terms of cycle safety in mind, we are very careful to place this film in context. I would foreground numerous other necessary improvements to London’s roads first, before any experiments like this—dealing with large trucks and buses; proper bike-lanes; massively reducing private car traffic; dealing with smaller-scale logistics movements; driver education; redesigning roads; campaigns; provision of better basic signage; better streets; bike parking and other infrastructure—all of these are more important than the technologies we’re exploring here, which may finally work best as an overlay onto those hard infrastructure alterations. On the research blog, where the film is presented, we draw attention to all these issues, using the film as ‘bait’ for that, essentially, as well as capturing a sense of what a better user experience for cycling might be.

The ideas emerged from conversations with people in London, and our own observations and understanding of London, and cycling (a kind of informed ‘self-centred research’)—and in particular here, the strategy to shift cycling to quieter 'backstreet' routes rather than the potentially dangerous heavily trafficked arteries. It’s a London film in that sense (and I’m tempted to suggest it actually addresses the internet-of-fings, as a result.) But many modern cities have the same issues, just as many cities have air pollution issues, bike-sharing schemes and so on.

The first two elements explore variations on 'head up displays' (HUD)—or, what if you took the essence of Google Glass-like interfaces and built them into bike helmet instead? And what kind of wayfinding elements might come into play if so? Not necessarily signs and bike paths as traditionally understood.

They also explore my original starting point—drawn from influential urbanist Kevin Lynch's old idea of 'imageability'—of reading the city via landmarks, edges, paths and so on, yet with augmented data. (This aspect came from our conversations with Google Creative Lab here in London, back in July 2014.)

In essence, such interfaces could help this process of learning the city, and ultimately disappear—but also understanding that tech can also do amazing things, like see through buildings, as with the Shard example in the film. So we could take advantage of that. It might be that, after a few goes with it, you don't need the interface at all, as you're reading the urban fabric as wayfinding. This would probably work better as a momentary 'taking of bearings', while paused at a traffic light, as in the first interface. The second shows someone moving whilst using the visor display, towards the Shard ...

This is something I originally sketched out for Museum of the Future 2015, based on a bike HUD heading towards the Shard, though we didn’t put it in the final show. See late night sketch of cyclist's view below. Always good to recycle ideas! More on that project soon too. The Shard did make it into these films, however, recognising its value as wayfinding landmark, at least.

These are little nudges, based on the idea of the rider taking bearings at certain points, but ultimately reinforcing the idea of learning the city. (And the nice thing about having an urbanist like Claire in the team is that she could take this half-formed thought and run with it.) These first couple of prototypes captured the imagination, such that this project was often reported as 'bike helmet of the future'.

We know air pollution is a big problem in modern cities, and although some research shows it can actually be less of an issue for cyclists than for car drivers, it was an issue we also wanted to explore, given cyclists’ ability to explore roads less travelled more flexibly (e.g. canal tow paths, parks, as well as quieter backstreets.) Our related Sensing Cities project (with Intel ICRI and others) involves building a sensor network capable of generating real-time data around air pollution. Thus the third interface suggests a way of enabling cyclists to choose routes with cleaner air in real time (probably fewer cars, HGVs and buses there too.) This device also suggests that wayfinding is not simply always about the quickest or most efficient route, but that there could be a range of reasons people choose a particular route —the quietest, the most beautiful, the one with a nice cafe on the way, the one most likely to avoid, or bump into, a particular person …

Heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) and buses present particular problems for cyclists. We are not pretending for one moment that this kind of tech could solve a city like London’s problems singlehandedly—again, that will require more concerted efforts by regulators and infrastructure providers. This will only be fixed by seriously reorienting our cities’ hard infrastructure towards walking and cycling, with regulation to support the removal of HGVs wherever possible, genuinely shifting the way logistics is handled. These augmented reality prototypes are no more than a sticking plaster in comparison. We have always been clear about that, as part of the motivation for the film, lest anyone is confused (road.cc readers, I’m looking at you.)

Nevertheless, the blind spot visualisation mock-up here suggests different things that so-called 'machine-to-machine' tech could do to enable a more considered interaction between bikes and large vehicles. A relatively small thing that might help in large ways.

And finally, we wanted to address bike sharing schemes, which we suspect have quite different usage patterns to privately-owned bikes. Here the team 3D-printed a device that clips to the share-bike’s basket, and used post-production to overlay a relatively subtle interface designed to help the more occasional user. Note the fluid, almost playful sense of direction and route, in direct counterpoint to the blunter, more linear signs for car drivers (left, straight on, right etc.). This recognises that cycling has a different dynamic and use of space, more like a bird than a bus. It’s a quieter mode, somehow in keeping with the meandering, perambulating kind of cycling that can occur on the sturdy, heavy bike-sharing bikes, yet also a kind of game-like interaction—keep the dot green to stay on the right trajectory. As with all the interfaces here, the team explored a more ‘glanceable’, almost ambient mode.

Again, the prototypes are 'design fictions', simply mock-ups in film (albeit skilfully done by the team, using a combination of 3D printing, Final Cut Pro and After Effects.) We make them to provoke dialogue, a way of thinking about technology in the city, and in this case, to engage people in a richer discussion about how we need to think about the experience of cycling.

Turning such things into products that would be ‘viable, desirable and feasible’ is not trivial, and we know that execution is all. Yet the core technologies exist, and are more or less at the right stage of development, price point, interoperability and so on—these ideas are not exactly science fiction. The Catapult would love to work with partners to explore how to turn concept into reality. Equally, we put these out there to inspire others to look at and test these kind of possibilities, and develop their own ideas, responses or counterpoints. To paraphrase a certain architect, they’re not the answer, but they might suggest better questions.

This was another project in our Connected Streets programme, which has previously included Connected Homes (looking at networked approaches to fabrication, construction and planning, in conjunction with Wikihouse, Arup et al) and Connected Displays (the Pixel Track prototype, with BERG), and also relates to our Sensing Cities environmental sensor project (with Intel and others.

]]>Experience DesignInteraction DesignSketchbookUrban informaticsDan Hill2015-09-04T09:41:40+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/09/sketchbook-new-user-experiences-for-cycling.htmlEssay: On Tesla Powerwall, and the skirmish between Moore's law and physical lawshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/c4U0ng2G1EU/tesla-powerwall.html
My latest column for Dezeen explores the urban implications of Tesla's Powerwall battery storage product. Here's the original edit: — The product launch of the early 21st century is a well-honed little drama. It’s become as streamlined and archetypal as...

The product launch of the early 21st century is a well-honed little drama. It’s become as streamlined and archetypal as the automobile launches of the mid-1950s, half-dressed girls running their fingers down the fins of a Cadillac; at least before Don Draper et al put that to bed in favour of the television age’s saccharine-soaked short films.

Now it’s the staged simulcast. It’s in California. A wide, deep stage, generally comprising black nothingness in order to foreground a giant video display and a single figure, a charismatic yet casually-dressed CEO. The CEO stands before a crowd of lanyarded acolytes, most of whom know exactly what they’re here for, yet feign surprise with a volley of whoops and cheers exactly on cue, as if press embargoes are hardwired into their tonsils. A few in-jokes, a few geek jokes, before portentous music heralds a well-crafted product video, loitering with intent over the sleek facets of a beautifully engineered object.

But last Thursday night’s launch was different. It wasn’t for an iPhone or a Hololens or a Chromebook. It was for a battery.

It was for a 130cm tall x 86 cm wide x 18cm deep box of lithium-ion battery storage. And yet it got the whoops and cheers accordingly. It’s just as well that the Duracell Bunny couldn’t see the attention this thing got.

Yet it could indeed change the world, this thing. It could indeed change the basic patterns of urban development, just as it could change the carbon footprint of entire societies.

Could it?

The CEO in question was Tesla’s Elon Musk, the CEO that makes Iron Man’s Tony Stark look like, well, Elon Musk. The CEO that, if he didn’t exist we’d have to invent him but oh yeah we did and that’s also Tony Stark. The billionaire genius CEO that delivered a well-considered, visionary and apparently humble keynote outlining the unbelievable promise of, well, a battery for your home.

Musk runs the now successful electric car business, Tesla Motors, as well as casually overseeing a list of more implausible lines of work, from a reusable spacecraft business, SpaceX, to Hyperloop, which can only be described as a theoretical subsonic air travel thing.

Musk positioned the Powerwall as the way to positively move our energy consumption away from fossil fuels, and their absurdly damaging generation and distribution models, and to shift our homes, transport and industry to renewable energy sources instead, principally solar energy.

The Tesla Powerwall is the first time that anybody has coherently and confidently aimed the storage battery at a domestic market. I mean really. There have been domestic storage products for years, but Tesla’s are the first to capture the imagination, to draw scalability and reliability from their electric car business, while halving the price overnight, with the entry level unit coming in at $3000. And available for order now. You can put this thing on your wall, connect to solar cells on your roof, and change the way that you generate, consume and pay for energy almost instantly.

The language is careful. The Powerwall offers “independence from the energy grid”. This does not imply leaving the grid altogether quite yet, and in reality, it remains nowhere near that for the average consumer, at least initially. But it would certainly enable you to use stored power instead when electricity prices are high, provide emergency backup during brownouts, and its modular extensibility builds over time.

This is not only better. The combination of rooftop solar and lithium-ion battery storage could soon be cheaper than the grid, too. The grid was one of the great inventions of the 20th century, but echoes the central organisation of that time, and increasingly seems a little out of time, rightly or wrongly.

For places with high energy prices controlled by handful of incumbent suppliers running relatively dumb grids, counterpointed with a decent and growing spread of rooftop solar, this could be genuinely transformative. There will numerous regulatory obstacles placed in the way by those incumbents, but it feels like history is on the side of the distributed solution.

Energy specialists, from journalists to industry figures, have been quick to query its value. Too expensive for mainstream consumers, they say, and that there are better technical solutions out there. Yet there is effectively nothing on the market to compare a Powerwall to, given the way that Tesla can market this product. They are positioning it outside of the existing energy sector altogether. It feels more like a Google or Apple product rather than—well, could you name another battery storage brand? That’s no accident. It also means all those energy specialists don’t really know what they’re dealing with anymore.

The dynamics of this new sector for storage have as much in common with Moore’s law as the laws of Ohm, Faraday, Maxwell or the original Tesla. The former, which posits (approximately speaking) that computing power doubles every 18 months or so, has held up for 50 years now, and is the creative engine behind the extraordinary influence that technology now has on contemporary culture.

This means that Tesla Powerwall needs to be considered as a version 1.0 release. The v1 is a beachhead landing; it gets the attention of consumers, investors, and sells. The v2 is what actually sells bucketloads, works well, cements a new product category, and consolidates entirely new markets. Pull out a v1 iPod, if you still have one, and compare with a recent iPhone. That’s the rapacious dynamic we’re dealing with here—what Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew Mcafee note in “The Second Machine Age” is exponential progress—and finally applied to the energy sector.

While battery storage is not a pure software problem, as raw physics still define many of the basic conditions, that dynamic suggests that Musk’s intimations are not idly made, with Tesla’s algorithms determining when to switch to stored energy, how to optimise its performance. As Marc Andreeson has said, software is eating the world. Sector after sector. Here at last is a startup-driven product that eats an aspect of an unhealthy world—that of fossil fuel-powered energy generation—and potentially replaces it with a better one.

As such, it will shape cities too. Technology has always been the primary shaper of cities. Rem Koolhaas recently stated, when asked by the EC about smart cities, that “the city used to be the domain of architects.” Oh Rem. Perhaps his mouth was outpacing his considerable intellect there, as his Venice Biennale ‘Elements’ show explicitly recognised the fundamental importance of technologies as well as building components, just as Reyner Banham had patiently and brilliantly explained how building services technologies and engineering directly shaped architecture and urbanism, half a century previously. Architects have helped shape cities, of course, but can we really say that the city has been “their domain” any more than technologists, engineers and inventors?

Oxford University professor Steve Rayner has a good list of the technologies that have driven cities, such as the elevator safety mechanism and the flushing toilet adding up to skyscrapers, from air conditioning enabling a sprawl of cities and city sprawl, from the more obvious impact of the automobile to the less obvious impact of jam (as a low cost delivery vehicle for sugar to fuel the industrial revolution, and thus enable Manchester and all that followed.)

Powerwall, and what follows in its wake, will shape cities accordingly too, in equally fundamental ways. The most interesting questions about a new kind of urban design do not concern traditional architecture and urbanism, but instead ask how contemporary networked technologies change interactions, services and spaces in cities—Powerwall can be seen in this context. What kind of urbanism does it suggest?

I was fortunate to be part of a temporary design studio in Helsinki a few years ago, which featured the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena. He sketched out a model of cellular, distributed infrastructure for the new developments on the forested outskirts of Finnish cities; essentially off-grid, medium-density, using various renewables, and modular forms of what would now be called micro-transit, and so on. Nothing spectacular there, but still as rare as hen’s teeth in reality. Local storage like Powerwall, outside of vanadium flow batteries, has been the missing link in those sketches. Until now.

In turn, this has a knock-on effect onto other centralised infrastructures—the tangled knot of cables, ducts, wires and sewers I alluded to in a previous column. With energy in mind in particular, and taken to its logical conclusion, it could imply erasing the step-down transformers, district heating plants, petrol stations that punctuate our streets, the cables draped across roads or in awkward ducts and pipes under the pavement, and further out, pylons, cooling towers, power stations, windmills and so on. Imagine the street free of all this. It’s unlikely to happen any time soon, given the insane energy loads contemporary society apparently demands, and the demands of mass transit and industry probably not catered for through local generation—but still. Imagine a city without that array of grid-based infrastructure, with the ‘fifth facade’ of roofs made productive, and energy stored near point of consumption.

It implies a shift to lighter, more agile forms of infrastructure layers. You can design, and modify, these layers later, faster—they’re more malleable, adaptable. (Depending on another design layer: the ownership and legal structures.) They’re perhaps closer, again, to the dynamics of Moore’s law than the laws of physics, with all that entails. It implies an urban strategy currently being explored by those other v1.0s, Uber and Airbnb, of not building or un-building—optimising the existing urban infrastructure rather than expensively building a new one, running entirely new applications on the same hardware.

I’d actually miss elements of that previous infrastructure. Will Self has noted the “irrefutable majesty” of pylons, these “giant humanoid figures” tracing connection across our country. I’ll miss the cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, seen from the train to Sheffield numerous times in my life. But this is pure nostalgia, another potentially damaging fuel source we would benefit from weening ourselves off.

This proximity to Moore’s law, and its subsequent lightness, also implies a certain flakiness, however. As startup culture begins to hit a city’s core infrastructures, we have to also ask questions about the expected levels of robustness, redundancy, security, ease of use, universal accessibility. We are surrounded by failures already, assailed by spinning beachballs or “Cannot join network” or “Unfortunately Maps has stopped”. Try to use the wifi on a British train. (Try to make a phone call on one, for that matter.)

This is something the froth of VC funding can’t mask when it gets physical. While the celebration and acceptance of failure in startup land—there is even a failureCon—is important, it needs to be tempered as it directly merges with our physical world.

I recall a great Jessica Helfand quote from the mid-1990s, when the term “information architecture” started to bed in; she said the main difference between information architecture and architecture is that the latter kills you when it falls on your head. That clean, meaningful division is fading, as digital and physical can no longer be prised apart so easily.

Some of the outcomes could be awkward or inconvenient; some of them could be dangerous. Go and read this Golden Krishna article about using the BMW app to open a car door as intended. Then come back and ask whether we want these principles applied to the way the street works? To autonomous vehicles? To emergency services? To energy systems?

There is of course a new kind of resilience through decentralised systems, an intentional redundancy through replication of small pieces, loosely joined—akin to what Adrian Lahoud memorably called a 'post-traumatic urbanism’. Yet there is also, currently, a lack of robustness, of security, when it comes to using IP backbone for core infrastructure, or when not working through interaction and service design work cogently enough.

And now the bar is being raised. Indeed, what is the domestic energy version of “Unexpected item in the bagging area”? I’m not sure I want to find out.

Hardware is hard. Hence the name. Most smart home stuff has not worked partly because we mistrust its utility (although Justin McGuirk has brilliantly picked apart the broader political dimension to these new Internet-of-things-enabled designs.) There’s this lack of robustness, and a lack of intuitive affordances. Using a phone to turn on a light can rarely be right. As a form of architecture, Tesla Powerwalls will need to be designed with what Vitruvious called “firmness, commodity and delight” in mind. They’ve probably got two out of three; it’s the ‘firmness’ that will need to be perfect with energy. But at least Tesla’s track record of building a business in automobiles, a highly-regulated, highly public product that cannot fail (generally, anyway), suggests that they are better placed than most startups.

An interesting follow-on question is how this might affect the psychology of urban communities. The off-the-grid story is traditionally associated with the lone woodsman, the Nordic summer house dweller, the beach shack—now it could be a semi-detached on Acacia Avenue, or a block of flats in Budapest. Will this withdrawal from the grid mean a similar withdrawal from civic society? As people lash together their own infrastructure, will they find it increasingly inconvenient to pay for the infrastructure of others, a basic tenet of living together in cities? A JG Ballard would unravel such a world beautifully; a kind of lithium-fuelled hybrid of his ‘High Rise’ meets HBO's ‘Silicon Valley’ meets Felicity Kendall's ‘The Good Life’. Equally, it might generate greater concerns for immediate environments. Again, it depends on the ownership model underpinning the infrastructure.

There is indeed an implicitly Californian image here; both the promise of endless summer—Musk jokes about that “handy fusion reactor in the sky”—and the individualistic suburban dwelling model, with the Powerwall looking like its natural habitat is the multi-car garage that the people on TV have. It’s not like that in the rest of the developed world, and nor in much of the so-called developing world.

Yet there’s no reason why a Powerwall has to work solely in a Californian context, or necessarily reinforce that NTSC suburbia.

The German energiewende over the last decade or so has left the majority of the country’s renewable energy infrastructure owned directly by individuals and communities rather than traditional energy companies. This is one of the biggest stories in Europe; I never understand why it’s not bigger news.

Yet the key aspect there is distributed ownership of infrastructure; local communities building, owning and using what they need—and that does play to the Tesla vision. Powerwall plus energiewende could be wunderbar. Connected arrays of Powerwalls—again, the v2.0 and beyond—could work for apartments just as well as the kind of monster homes we see on ‘Modern Family’. If we saw the terrace as a long apartment block on its side, there no reason why shared storage infrastructure wouldn’t work there, either. It might then imply new collective models of civic ownership; again, to borrow a German example, like the baugruppen.

This is the key question about Californian tech; can we ignore their ideology and lifestyle and just steal their machines? I don’t see why not.

Finally (for now), there is the greater question of the product lifecycle: about the material flows before and after. While any move away from fossil fuels is a move in the right direction, Tesla’s announcement also fuelled a debate in the ‘critical metals’ world about the amounts of lithium, cobalt and graphite in the batteries, and then in ground.

Behind the development, a legion of extractive industries must gear up, their vast robotic trucks crawling across mines in Australia, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, ‘feed stock’ suppliers for Chinese and South Korean processing expertise, and then on to Japan, and Tesla’s suppliers such as Panasonic. And soon, a new highway being built from the Chemetall-Foote lithium mine in Nevada, four hours south of Tesla’s Gigafactory site, part of an enormous package of state subsidies to attract the company there. (Note also, though, Shenzhen’s BYD, which has a similar ambition to the Gigafactory.)

Musk claims in the keynote that such storage batteries could cater for all our energy needs. He admits it’s a fairly bold hypothetical. (He somehow balances apparently genuine humility and ambitious hubris as he does this.) Yet some doubt there’s enough lithium on our little planet to do this. (Of course, SpaceX, another of Musk’s ventures, sets up the possibility of extraction and retrieval from planets other than Earth. But let’s assume that one’s a way off, even for Musk.)

The US Geological Survey says we have a fair amount in the ground and a fair amount as yet undiscovered. But still. The Gigafactory running at full tilt by 2020 would probably disrupt that assumption, particularly when competing with the needs of other electric car manufacturers.

That is where the shared on-demand vehicle is far more disruptive—an innovation that actively reduces consumption, not just switches its fuel source, by using the dynamics of the so-called sharing economy. That would leave Powerwalls free to power the things attached to our walls, taking one particularly hungry beast out of the domestic energy profile.

Yet interestingly, Tesla Energy is the exact opposite of a sharing economy approach, reinforcing that now deeply unfashionable idea of ownership. Amory Lovins once stated, “People don’t want raw kilowatt hours … they want hot showers, cold beer, comfort, mobility, illumination.” Musk is testing this thesis—will people care enough to see the connection between kilowatt hours and the cold beer?

If they do, perhaps these Powerwalls become the energy equivalent of Vitsoe 606 shelving, people taking it with them as they move (and if Tesla they had one iota of Vitsoe’s customer service, that would be worth a few grand right there.) However, unlike Vitsoe, the tech dynamic means the Powerwalls could be redundant within a decade. It cuts both ways, technology, and perhaps indicates that the better model is ultimately rental, where the equipment is replaced over time, perhaps along with your solar cells.)

Taken together, perhaps this the most interesting emerging theme in urbanism? Networked systems as a connective tissue laced in-between existing infrastructures? It leaves core grid energy as supporting the heavy hitters of mass transit and large industry, with smaller users catered for by independent distributed energy, just as mass transit is now surrounded by legions of ‘micro-transit’ startups, working in the gaps, and new digitally-enabled participation models work below the radar of centralised bureaucracies. The physical forms, and interaction and service models, are modelled on distributed organisation. This is a new urban infrastructure: light, cheap, networked, optimising existing fabric rather than building anew. Yet also, individualised, fragmented, market-based, potentially throwaway, and with the internet underpinning it, and the extractive industries that power it, as increasingly centralised entities. Which is which?

Tesla cars themselves are insufferably dull objects. The forthcoming mass-market Tesla Model 3 has all the panache of a Volkswagen Jetta. Playing into a highly conservative market, a Tesla car is never going to described as the cathedral of our age, as Roland Barthes once said of the Citroën DS. The Powerwall itself is an entirely obvious object. One’s tempted to ask what would an Ettore Sottsass would’ve done with the brief; but that would be missing the point.

Design itself has moved on. It’s the design of the largely invisible and infinite crystalline network structures of interactions and services, or the planetary-scale manufacturing and supply chains that drive Tesla’s business, that could be seen as cathedrals, or perhaps even something closer to the mystical forces that cathedrals were built in thrall to.

The scale of ambition, rather than the scale of the object, is the impressive feature of Tesla’s thinking under Musk. While the fuss is over the design of an object—and if the Powerwall embodies a mainstream movement away from fossil fuels, then there will be no more alluring sight on earth—it’s the system design, the more fluid layer of services that is overlaid onto our existing infrastructures, that is the truly transformational possibility, predicated on this increasingly intriguing skirmish between Moore’s law and the laws of physics. That form of design, rather than traditional architectural thinking, is the force driving our cities now, just as previous generations of technology did.

]]>Cities & PlacesEngineeringEssaysProduct designUrban informaticsDan Hill2015-05-15T05:54:35+01:00https://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2015/05/tesla-powerwall.htmlSketchbook: Noticing planning noticeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cityofsound/JuiP/~3/1-wjgy-6s5Q/planning-notices.html
The primary interface between the UK’s planning system and the people and places it serves is a piece of A4 paper tied to a lamppost in the rain. OK, not always rain. But rain often enough. The paper is a...

The primary interface between the UK’s planning system and the people and places it serves is a piece of A4 paper tied to a lamppost in the rain. OK, not always rain. But rain often enough.

The paper is a public notice describing a planning application for some kind of ‘development’ somewhere in the vicinity. If it’s a significant development, and very close to your property, you may also get a notification in the post. However, this bit of A4 paper, via the local council, is essentially the only attempt to communicate how a neighbourhood may be about to change.

For something as fundamental as this—how your actual, physical neighbourhood may change—it seems little more than a token gesture. There could be few more important urban interactions, potentially; and yet this is our best attempt to garnering your attention, your input. You’re supposed to read it and get in touch if you want to discuss the development. Implicitly, that means if you want to object to the development, and as such, It’s an interface largely geared around a negative impulses (the opposite of Brickstarter's starting point) Given that, the more conspiratorial amongst you will suggest that a token gesture is the point.

The paper notices are ubiquitous, tied at eye level in well-trafficked places. Yet they are also effectively invisible, largely ignored by all and sundry. They are the lonely, silent messengers of a planning system that is also effectively invisible—until you happen to be caught on the wrong side of it, or are trying to get something through it— yet is still supposed to be the primary way that we engage with collectively shaping our cities.

If one did notice the notice, you’d find language which is often alarmist (Camden lead with HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU?, which immediately gets the conversation off on the wrong foot. “How does WHAT affect me?!” “Something’s going to affect me?!”) Or else largely impenetrable. Or the detail is insufficient; there are never any drawings, photos or models (presumably not allowed within the current legislation.)

For the last year, I’ve been collecting examples of planning notices in the wild, most of them collated into the accompanying video. Making a video is clearly an absurd thing to do, but somehow it felt appropriate.

I seem to be the only person even looking at the notices, never mind filming them. I’ve begun to feel almost sorry for them; at least, as much as one can for a bit of paper. The lucky notices get laminated; most fade or disintegrate over time, eroded by weather and lack of attention, before slipping down to the pavement, where their final audience can only be dogs, foxes, rats.

A particularly interesting example near our kids' school, where plastic bags holding the notices have filled with water, which is warming and cooling daily, creating the conditions for life whilst dissolving the notices from the bottom-up. They may be developing new cultures in there, a new micro-neighbourhood, a form of inadvertent permitted development.

The video captures the variety of notices—a largely unnecessary variety, it must be said, given the inherent consistency of the regulation—and the environments they’re in. Mostly London, Manchester, Newcastle. Mostly lampposts. Sometimes tied to notices about picking up dog waste. What it can’t really show is the subject of the notices, which range from the introduction of sliding doors to a major, multi-storey housing development. The same piece of paper, posted up in the same numbers, either way. Here's a set of photos.

(Aside: the soundtrack is Philip Glass’s ‘String Quartet No. 3 (Mishima): VI. Mishima/Closing’, performed by Kronos Quartet. It had the right plaintive quality. Hopefully the rights holders will understand the context and spirit it’s being used in; either way, it’s from ’Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass’ (Nonesuch, 1995) and you should buy a copy.)

The notices seem forlorn emblems of a system that is now completely out of kilter with contemporary cultures, whether business, community or civic. These pieces of paper are the physical suggestion of opaque processes, paper-based interactions, lengthy delays, bureaucratic obfuscation, unclear strategies, community-led NIMBYism as much as developer-led circumvention, and more besides. Perhaps this implied negative weight is one reason why people subconsciously ignore them. To coin a phrase, they are the matter that signifies the dark matter of the planning system.

Yet it is just as likely that the peripheral vision registers them as adverts or missing cat posters as much as anything, and filters out accordingly. To hope that people will simply notice the notice seems lazy and irresponsible, given the numerous communication options available to us. Our planning systems do little to reflect an age in which many people (in this country) are almost constantly connected; increasingly using social media to interact around about shared concerns, increasingly around complex aggregations of urban issues.

The connected street is laden with alternative possibilities for such communications. Various networked technologies enable the previously mundane sentinels of the street—lampposts, traffic lights, benches, sensor boxes, building facades, bus-stops, bike racks, signage—to become more active interfaces for conversations and interactions, for data and augmented projections of what might be. Here is a space where the Internet of Things might genuinely thrive. Here is a possibility of a new, interactive form of street furniture, in the grand tradition of David Mellor, Kinneir and Calvert and Design Research Unit, yet reimagined for the networked age, by marrying interaction design with architecture, industrial design with urban planning, code with urbanism. Token gestures become gestural tokens. A more holistic approach wouldn’t necessarily mean completely relegating paper, or relying solely on smartphones, but would involve numerous touchpoints orchestrated to coherently work together, whether e-ink, AR or equivalent. And yes, probably paper at some point too.

For it’s not the materiality of paper that's an issue. Just as the planning notice was intended to stand for the unseen mechanics of the planning system, the notice now evidently also betrays a lack of thought, care and investment from those responsible for the planning system. These ignored bits of paper represent the state of planning, as a practice and service, as much as anything else, the lack of institutional interest in designing a system that actually works for today and tomorrow.

Planning is far more than simply communicating decision-points. It involves complex trade-offs, from carbon to economic development to heritage and cultural identity, never mind the small matter of local politics. It involves long-term decisions, with hard material outcomes. These are things that are not exactly easy to convey at a glance in the street, or via a 'Like' button. They do not just submit to idle design fictions of what planning could be. Whilst it would be enjoyable to reimagine the planning notice, redesigning the planning system itself is rather more important*

Yet, given what we now understand about strategy and design, starting with the interactions in the street and working up from there may be the best approach to take.

At this point—when, after all, we can land a probe on a comet in space, and more besides—we can surely do better than our primary interface for engaging our citizens in city-making being a piece of paper tied to a lamppost in the rain.

* In terms of that broader redesign, the Brickstarter project we did at SITRA’s Strategic Design Unit in Helsinki collated a lot of thinking. Finn Williams and David Knight’s Sub-Plan would be obvious precursors, as would the newer approaches of Spacehive et al, as well as alternative models for planning-related discussion, from Chile’s Hybrid Forums to Renew Newcastle to Switzerland’s baugespann. Each of these has physical interaction points as well as digital; each questions the scale of a decision (who needs to know, and who needs to decide and how, what happens in a neighbourhood, a district, a city?) and each explores different ways for decisions to be communicated, developed, discussed, recorded.